NUNC COCNOSCO EX PARTE

THOMAS J. BATA LIBRARY TRENT UNIVERSITY

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OLD NEW YORK

THE OLD MAID

(The J. Fifties )

By EDITH WHARTON

OLD NEW YORK False Dawn The Old Maid The Spark New Year's Day

THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

SUMMER

THE REEF

THE MARNE

FRENCH WAYS AND THEIR MEANING

OLD NEW YORK

THE OLD MAID

{The ’ Fifties )

BY

EDITH WHARTON

AUTHOR OF “THE AGE OF INNOCENCE,” ETC.

DECORATIONS BY E. C. CASWELL

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

NEW YORK :: LONDON :: MCMXXIV

.^(*<95

copyright, 1924, bt D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

Copyright, 1922, by The Consolidated Magazines Corporation (The Red Book Magazine)

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

THE OLD MAID

(The ‘Fifties)

PART I

250347

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/oldmaidthefiftieOOOOwhar

THE OLD MAID

( The \ Fifties )

I

IN’ the old New York of the ’fifties a few families ruled, in simplicity and affluence. Of these were the Ralstons.

The sturdy English and the rubicund and heavier Dutch had mingled to pro¬ duce a prosperous, prudent and yet lavish society. To “do things handsomely” had always been a fundamental principle in this cautious world, built up on the for¬ tunes of bankers, India merchants, ship¬ builders and ship-chandlers. Those well- fed slow-moving people, who seemed irritable and dyspeptic to European eyes

[3]

THE OLD MAID

only because the caprices of the climate had stripped them of superfluous flesh, and strung their nerves a little tighter, lived in a genteel monotony of which the surface was never stirred by the dumb dramas now and then enacted under¬ ground. Sensitive souls in those days were like muted key-boards, on which Fate played without a sound.

In this compact society, built of solidly welded blocks, one of the largest areas was filled by the Ralstons and their rami¬ fications. The Ralstons were of middle- class English stock. They had not come to the colonies to die for a creed but to live for a bank-account. The result had been beyond their hopes, and their religion was tinged by their success. An edul¬ corated Church of England which, under the conciliatory name of the “Episcopal Church of the United States of America,” [4]

THE OLD MAID

left out the coarser allusions in the Mar¬ riage Service, slid over the comminatory passages in the Athanasian Creed, and thought it more respectful to say “Our Father who ” than “which” in the Lord’s Prayer, was exactly suited to the spirit of compromise whereon the Ralstons had built themselves up. There was in all the tribe the same instinctive recoil from new religions as from unaccounted-for people. Institutional to the core, they represented the conservative element that holds new societies together as seaplants bind the seashore.

Compared with the Ralstons, even such traditionalists as the Lovells, the Halseys or the Vandergraves appeared careless, in¬ different to money, almost reckless in their impulses and indecisions. Old John Fred¬ erick Ralston, the stout founder of the race, had perceived the difference, and

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THE OLD MAID

emphasized it to his son, Frederick John, in whom he had scented a faint leaning toward the untried and unprofitable.

“You let the Lannings and the Dago- nets and the Spenders take risks and fly kites. It’s the county-family blood in ’em : we’ve nothing to do with that. Look how they’re petering out already — the men, I mean. Let your boys marry their girls, if you like (they’re wholesome and handsome) ; though I’d sooner see my grandsons take a Lovell or a Vander- grave, or any of our own kind. But don’t let your sons go mooning around after their young fellows, horse-racing, and

running down south to those d - d

Springs, and gambling at Yew Orleans, and all the rest of it. That’s how you’ll build up the family, and keep the weather out. The way we’ve always done it.”

Frederick John listened, obeyed, mar-

r 6i

THE OLD MAID

ried a Halsey, and passively followed in his father's steps. He belonged to the cautious generation of New York gentle¬ men who revered Hamilton and served Jefferson, who longed to lay out New Y ork like Washington, and who laid it out instead like a gridiron, lest they should be thought “undemocratic” by people they secretly looked down upon. Shop¬ keepers to the marrow, they put in their windows the wares there was most de¬ mand for, keeping their private opinions for the back-shop, where through lack of use. they gradually lost substance and colour.

The fourth generation of Ralstons had nothing left in the way of convictions save an acute sense of honour in private and business matters; on the life of the community and the state they took their daily views from the newspapers, and the

[H

THE OLD MAID

newspapers they already despised. The Ralstons had done little to shape the des¬ tiny of their country, except to finance the Cause when it had become safe to do so. They were related to many of the great men who had built the Republic; but no Ralston had so far committed himself as to be great. As old John Frederick said, it was safer to be satisfied with three per cent: they regarded heroism as a form of gambling. Yet by merely being so nu¬ merous and so similar they had come to have a weight in the community. People said: “The Ralstons” when they wished to invoke a precedent. This attribution of authority had gradually convinced the third generation of its collective impor¬ tance, and the fourth, to which Delia Ral¬ ston’s husband belonged, had the ease and simplicity of a ruling class.

Within the limits of their universal

[8]

THE OLD MAID

caution, the Ralstons fulfilled their obli¬ gations as rich and respected citizens. They figured on the boards of all the old- established charities, gave handsomely to thriving institutions, had the best cooks in New York, and when they travelled abroad ordered statuary of the American sculptors in Rome whose reputation was already established. The first Ralston who had brought home a statue had been regarded as a wild fellow; but when it became known that the sculptor had exe¬ cuted several orders for the British aris¬ tocracy it was felt in the family that this too was a three per cent investment.

Two marriages with the Dutch Van- dergraves had consolidated these qualities of thrift and handsome living, and the carefully built-up Ralston character was now so congenital that Delia Ralston sometimes asked herself whether, were

[9]

THE OLD MAID

she to turn her own little boy loose in a wilderness, he would not create a small New York there, and be on all its boards of directors.

Delia Lovell had married James Ral¬ ston at twenty. The marriage, which had taken place in the month of September, 1840, had been solemnized, as was then the custom, in the drawing-room of the bride’s country home, at what is now the corner of Avenue A and Ninety-first Street, overlooking the Sound. Thence her husband had driven her (in Grand¬ mamma Lovell’s canary-coloured coach with a fringed hammer-cloth) through spreading suburbs and untidy elm-shaded streets to one of the new houses in Gra- mercy Park, which the pioneers of the younger set were just beginning to affect; and there, at five-and-twenty, she was established, the mother of two children, [10]

THE OLD MAID

the possessor of a generous allowance of pin-money, and, by common consent, one of the handsomest and most popular “young matrons” (as they were called) of her day.

She was thinking placidly and grate¬ fully of these things as she sat one after¬ noon in her handsome bedroom in Gra- mercy Park. She was too near to the primitive Ralstons to have as clear a view of them as, for instance, the son in ques¬ tion might one day command: she lived under them as unthinkingly as one lives under the laws of one’s country. Yet that tremor of the muted key-board, that secret questioning which sometimes beat in her like wings, would now and then so divide her from them that for a fleeting moment she could survey them in their relation to other things. The moment was always fleeting; she dropped back

[H]

THE OLD MAID

from it quickly, breathless and a little pale, to her children, her house-keeping, her new dresses and her kindly Jim.

She thought of him today with a smile of tenderness, remembering how he had told her to spare no expense on her new bonnet. Though she was twenty-five, and twice a mother, her image was still sur¬ prisingly fresh. The plumpness then thought seemly in a young wife stretched the grey silk across her bosom, and caused her heavy gold watch-chain — after it left the anchorage of the brooch of St. Peter’s in mosaic that fastened her low-cut Cluny collar — to dangle perilously in the void above a tiny waist buckled into a velvet waist-band. But the shoulders above sloped youthfully under her Cashmere scarf, and every movement was as quick as a girl’s.

Mrs. Jim Ralston approvingly exam-

[12]

THE OLD MAID

ined the rosy-cheeked oval set in the blonde ruffles of the bonnet on which, in compliance with her husband’s instruc¬ tions, she had spared no expense. It was a cabriolet of white velvet tied with wide satin ribbons and plumed with a crystal- spangled marabout— a wedding bonnet ordered for the marriage of her cousin, Charlotte Lovell, which was to take place that week at St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie. Charlotte was making a match exactly like Delia’s own: marrying a Ralston, of the Waverlv Place branch, than which nothing could be safer, sounder or more — well, usual. Delia did not know why the word had occurred to her, for it could hardly be postulated, even of the young women of her own narrow clan, that they “usually” married Ralstons; but the soundness, safeness, suitability of the ar¬ rangement, did make it typical of the

[13]

THE OLD MAID

kind of alliance which a nice girl in the nicest set would serenely and blushingly forecast for herself.

Yes — and afterward?

Well — what? And what did this new question mean? Afterward: why, of course, there was the startled puzzled sur¬ render to the incomprehensible exigencies of the young man to whom one had at most yielded a rosy cheek in return for an engagement ring; there was the large double-bed; the terror of seeing him shav¬ ing calmly the next morning, in his shirt¬ sleeves, through the dressing-room door; the evasions, insinuations, resigned smiles and Bible texts of one’s Mamma; the re¬ minder of the phrase “to obey” in the glittering blur of the Marriage Service; a week or a month of flushed distress, con¬ fusion, embarrassed pleasure ; then the growth of habit, the insidious lulling of [ D]

THE OLD MAID

the matter-of-course, the dreamless double slumbers in the big white bed, the early- morning discussions and consultations through that dressing-room door which had once seemed to open into a fiery pit scorching the brow of innocence.

And then, the babies; the babies who were supposed to “make up for every¬ thing,” and didn't — though they were such darlings, and one had no definite notion as to what it was that one had missed, and that they were to make up for.

Yes: Charlotte’s fate would be just like hers. Joe Ralston was so like his second cousin Jim (Delia’s James), that Delia could see no reason why life in the squat brick house in Waverly Place should not exactly resemble life in the tall brown- stone house in Gramercy Park. Only Charlotte’s bedroom would certainly not be as pretty as hers.

[15]

THE OLD MAID

She glanced complacently at the French wall-paper that reproduced a watered silk, with a “valanced” border, and tassels between the loops. The ma¬ hogany bedstead, covered with a white embroidered counterpane, was symmetri¬ cally reflected in the mirror of a wardrobe which matched it. Coloured lithographs of the “Four Seasons” by Leopold Robert surmounted groups of family daguerreo¬ types in deeply-recessed gilt frames. The ormolu clock represented a shepherdess sitting on a fallen trunk, a basket of flowers at her feet. A shepherd, stealing up, surprised her with a kiss, while her little dog barked at him from a clump of roses. One knew the profession of the lovers by their crooks and the shape of their hats. This frivolous time-piece had been a wedding-gift from Delia’s aunt, Mrs. Manson Mingott, a dashing widow [16]

THE OLD MAID

who lived in Paris and was received at the Tuileries. It had been entrusted by Mrs. Mingott to young Clement Spender, who had come back from Italy for a short holiday just after Delia’s marriage; the marriage which might never have been, if Clem Spender could have supported a wife, or if he had consented to give up painting and Rome for New York and the law. The young man (who looked, already, so odd and foreign and sarcastic) had laughingly assured the bride that her aunt’s gift was “the newest thing in the Palais Royal”; and the family, who ad¬ mired Mrs. Manson Mingott’s taste though they disapproved of her “foreign¬ ness,” had criticized Delia’s putting the clock in her bedroom instead of displaying it on the drawing-room mantel. But she liked, when she woke in the morning, to see the bold shepherd stealing his kiss.

[17]

THE OLD MAID

Charlotte would certainly not have such a pretty clock in her bedroom; but then she had not been used to pretty things. Her father, who had died at thirty of lung-fever, was one of the “poor Lovells.” His widow, burdened with a young fam¬ ily, and living all the year round “up the River,” could not do much for her eldest girl ; and Charlotte had entered society in her mother’s turned garments, and shod with satin sandals handed down from a defunct aunt who had “opened a ball” with General Washington. The old- fashioned Ralston furniture, which Delia already saw herself banishing, would seem sumptuous to Chatty; very likely she would think Delia’s gay French time¬ piece somewhat frivolous, or even not “quite nice.” Poor Charlotte had become so serious, so prudish almost, since she had given up balls and taken to visiting the [18]

THE OLD MAID

poor! Delia remembered, with ever-re¬ curring wonder, the abrupt change in her : the precise moment at which it had been privately agreed in the family that, after all, Charlotte Lovell was going to be an old maid.

They had not thought so when she came out. Though her mother could not afford to give her more than one new tarlatan dress, and though nearly everything in her appearance was regrettable, from the too bright red of her hair to the too pale brown of her eyes — not to mention the rounds of brick-rose on her cheek-bones, which almost (preposterous thought!) made her look as if she painted — yet these defects were redeemed by a slim waist, a light foot and a gay laugh ; and when her hair was well oiled and brushed for an evening party, so that it looked almost brown, and lay smoothly along her deli-

[19]

THE OLD MAID

cate cheeks under a wreath of red and white camellias, several eligible young men (Joe Ralston among them) were known to have called her pretty.

Then came her illness. She caught cold on a moonlight sleighing-party, the brick- rose circles deepened, and she began to cough. There was a report that she was “going like her father,” and she was hur¬ ried off to a remote village in Georgia, where she lived alone for a year with an old family governess. When she came back everyone felt at once that there was a change in her. She was pale, and thinner than ever, but with an exquisitely trans¬ parent cheek, darker eyes and redder hair ; and the oddness of her appearance was increased by plain dresses of Quakerish cut. She had left off trinkets and watch- chains, always wore the same grey cloak and small close bonnet, and displayed a [20]

THE OLD MAID

sudden zeal for visiting the indigent. The family explained that during her year in the south she had been shocked by the hopeless degradation of the “poor whites” and their children, and that this revelation of misery had made it impos¬ sible for her to return to the light-hearted life of her young friends. Everyone agreed, with significant glances, that this unnatural state of mind would “pass off in time”; and meanwhile old Mrs. Lovell, Chatty’s grandmother, who understood her perhaps better than the others, gave her a little money for her paupers, and lent her a room in the Lovell stables (at the back of the old lady’s Mercer Street house) where she gathered about her, in what would afterward have been called a “day-nursery,” some of the destitute chil¬ dren of the neighbourhood. There was even, among them, the baby girl whose

[21]

THE OLD MAID

origin had excited such intense curiosity two or three years earlier, when a veiled lady in a handsome cloak had brought it to the hovel of Cyrus Washington, the negro handy-man whose wife Jessamine took in Dr. Lanskell’s washing. Dr. Lanskell, the chief medical practitioner of the day, was presumably versed in the secret history of every household from the Battery to Union Square; but, though beset by inquisitive patients, he had invari¬ ably declared himself unable to identify Jessamine’s “veiled lady,” or to hazard a guess as to the origin of the hundred dollar bill pinned to the baby’s bib.

The hundred dollars were never re¬ newed, the lady never reappeared, but the baby lived healthily and happily with Jessamine’s piccaninnies, and as soon as it could toddle was brought to Chatty Lovell’s day-nursery, where it appeared [22]

THE OLD MAID

(like its fellow paupers) in little garments cut down from her old dresses, and socks knitted by her untiring hands. Delia, absorbed in her own babies, had neverthe¬ less dropped in once or twice at the nur¬ sery, and had come away wishing that Chatty’s maternal instinct might find its normal outlet in marriage. The married cousin confusedly felt that her own affec¬ tion for her handsome children was a mild and measured sentiment compared with Chatty’s fierce passion for the waifs in Grandmamma Lovell’s stable.

And then, to the general surprise, Charlotte Lovell engaged herself to Joe Ralston. It was known that Joe had “admired her” the year she came out. She was a graceful dancer, and Joe, who was tall and nimble, had footed it with her through many a reel and schottische. By the end of the winter all the match-makers

[23]

THE OLD MAID

were predicting that something would come of it; but when Delia sounded her cousin, the girl’s evasive answer and burn¬ ing brow seemed to imply that her suitor had changed his mind, and no further questions could be asked. Now it was clear that there had, in fact, been an old romance between them, probably followed by that exciting incident, a “misunder¬ standing”; but at last all was well, and the bells of St. Mark’s were preparing to ring in happier days for Charlotte. “Ah, when she has her first baby,” the Ralston mothers chorused . . .

“Chatty!” Delia exclaimed, pushing back her chair as she saw her cousin’s image reflected in the glass over her shoulder.

Charlotte Lovell had paused in the [24]

THE OLD MAID

doorway. “They told me you were here — so I ran up.”

“Of course, darling. How handsome you do look in your poplin ! I always said you needed rich materials. I’m so thank¬ ful to see you out of grey cashmere.” Delia, lifting her hands, removed the white bonnet from her dark polished head, and shook it gently to make the crystals glitter.

“I hope you like it? It’s for your wed¬ ding,” she laughed.

Charlotte Lovell stood motionless. In her mother’s old dove-coloured poplin, freshly banded with narrow rows of crim¬ son velvet ribbon, an ermine tippet crossed on her bosom, and a new beaver bonnet with a falling feather, she had already something of the assurance and majesty of a married woman.

“And you know your hair certainly is

[25]

THE OLD MAID

darker, darling,” Delia added, still hope¬ fully surveying her.

“Darker? It’s grey,” Charlotte sud¬ denly broke out in her deep voice. She pushed back one of the pommaded bands that framed her face, and showed a white lock on her temple. “You needn’t save up your bonnet; I’m not going to be married,” she added, with a smile that showed her small white teeth in a fleeting glare.

Delia had just enough presence of mind to lay down the bonnet, marabout-up, before she flung herself on her cousin.

“Not going to be married? Charlotte, are you perfectly crazy?”

“Why is it crazy to do what I think right?”

“But people said you were going to marry him the year you came out. And no one understood what happened then. [26]

THE OLD MAID

And now — how can it possibly be right? You simply can’t!" Delia incoherently cried.

“Oh — people!” said Charlotte Lovell wearily.

Her married cousin looked at her with a start. Something thrilled in her voice that Delia had never heard in it, or in any other human voice, before. Its echo seemed to set their familiar world rocking, and the Axminster carpet actually heaved under Delia’s shrinking slippers.

Charlotte Lovell stood staring ahead of her with strained lids. In the pale brown of her eyes Delia noticed the green specks that floated there when she was angry or excited.

“Charlotte — where on earth have you come from?” she questioned, drawing the girl down to the sofa.

“Come from?”

[27]

THE OLD MAID

“Yes. You look as if you had seen a ghost — an army of ghosts.”

The same snarling smile drew up Char¬ lotte’s lip. “I’ve seen Joe,” she said.

“Well? — Oh, Chatty,” Delia exclaimed, abruptly illuminated, “you don’t mean to say that you’re going to let any little thing in Joe’s past — ? Not that I’ve ever heard the least hint; never. But even if there were. . . ” She drew a deep breath, and bravely proceeded to extremities. “Even if you’ve heard that he’s been . . . that he’s had a child — of course he would have provided for it before . . .”

The girl shook her head. “I know: you needn’t go on. ‘Men will be men’; but it’s not that.”

“Tell me what it is.”

Charlotte Lovell looked about the sunny prosperous room as if it were the image of her world, and that world [28]

THE OLD MAID

were a prison she must break out of. She lowered her head. “I want — to get away,” she panted.

“Get away? From Joe?”

“From his ideas — the Ralston ideas.”

Delia bridled — after all, she was a Ral¬ ston! “The Ralston ideas? I haven’t found them — so unbearably unpleasant to live with,” she smiled a little tartly.

“No. But it was different with you: they didn’t ask you to give up things.”

“What things?” What in the world (Delia wondered) had poor Charlotte that any one could want her to give up? She had always been in the position of taking rather than of having to surrender. “Can't you explain to me, dear?” Delia urged.

“My poor children — he says I’m to give them up,” cried the girl in a stricken whisper.

[29]

THE OLD MAID

“Give them up? Give up helping them?”

“Seeing them — looking after them. Give them up altogether. He got his mother to explain to me. After — after we have children . . . he’s afraid . . . afraid our children might catch things. . . . He’ll give me money, of course, to pay some one ... a hired person, to look after them. He thought that handsome,” Charlotte broke out with a sob. She flung off her bonnet and smothered her prostrate weeping in the cushions.

Delia sat perplexed. Of all unforeseen complications this was surely the least imaginable. And with all the acquired Ralston that was in her she could not help seeing the force of Joe’s objection, could almost find herself agreeing with him. N o one in N ew Y ork had forgotten the death of the poor Henry van der Luydens’ only [30]

THE OLD MAID

child, who had caught small-pox at the circus to which an unprincipled nurse had surreptitiously taken him. After such a warning as that, parents felt justified in every precaution against contagion. And poor people were so ignorant and careless, and their children, of course, so perpetually exposed to everything catch¬ ing. No, Joe Ralston was certainly right, and Charlotte almost insanely unreason¬ able. But it would be useless to tell her so now. Instinctively, Delia temporized.

“After all,” she whispered to the prone ear, “if it’s only after you have children — you may not have any — for some time.”

“Oh, yes, I shall!” came back in anguish from the cushions.

Delia smiled with matronly superiority. “Really, Chatty, I don’t quite see how you can know. You don’t understand.”

Charlotte Lovell lifted herself up. Her

[31]

THE OLD MAID

collar of Brussels lace had come undone and hung in a wisp on her crumpled bodice, and through the disorder of her hair the white lock glimmered haggardly. In her pale brown eyes the little green specks floated like leaves in a trout-pool.

“Poor girl,” Delia thought, “how old and ugly she looks! More than ever like an old maid; and she doesn’t seem to realize in the least that she’ll never have another chance.”

“You must try to be sensible. Chatty dear. After all, one’s own babies have the first claim.”

“That’s just it.” The girl seized her fiercely by the wrists. “How can I give up my own baby?”

“Your — your — ?” Delia’s world again began to waver under her. “Which of the poor little waifs, dearest, do you call your own baby?” she questioned patiently.

[32]

THE OLD MAID

Charlotte looked her straight in the eyes. “I call my own baby my own baby.”

“Your own — ? Take care — you’re hurt¬ ing my wrists, Chatty!” Delia freed her¬ self, forcing a smile. “Your own — ?”

“My own little girl. The one that Jessamine and Cyrus — ”

“Oh — ” Delia Ralston gasped.

The two cousins sat silent, facing each other; but Delia looked away. It came over her with a shudder of repugnance that such things, even if they had to be said, should not have been spoken in her bedroom, so near the spotless nursery across the passage. Mechanically she smoothed the organ-like folds of her silk skirt, which her cousin’s embrace had tumbled. Then she looked again at Char¬ lotte’s eyes, and her own melted.

“Oh, poor Chatty — my poor Chatty!” She held out her arms to her cousin.

[33]

II

THE shepherd continued to steal his kiss from the shepherdess, and the clock in the fallen trunk continued to tick out the minutes.

Delia, petrified, sat unconscious of their passing, her cousin clasped to her. She was dumb with the horror and amazement of learning that her own blood ran in the veins of the anonymous foundling, the “hundred dollar baby” about whom New York had so long furtively jested and conjectured. It was her first contact with the nether side of the smooth social sur¬ face, and she sickened at the thought that such things were, and that she, Delia Ralston, should be hearing of them in her [34]

THE OLD MAID

own house, and from the lips of the victim ! For Chatty of course was a victim — but whose? She had spoken no name, and Delia could put no question: the horror of it sealed her lips. Her mind had in¬ stantly raced back over Chatty’s past ; but she saw no masculine figure in it but Joe Ralston’s. And to connect Joe with the episode was obviously unthinkable. Some one in the south, then — ? But no: Char¬ lotte had been ill when she left — and in a flash Delia understood the real nature of that illness, and of the girl’s disappear¬ ance. But from such speculations too her mind recoiled, and instinctively she fastened on something she could still grasp: Joe Ralston’s attitude about Chatty’s paupers. Of course Joe could not let his wife risk bringing contagion into their home — that was safe ground to dwell on. Her own Jim would have felt

[35]

THE OLD MAID

in the same way; and she would certainly have agreed with him.

Her eyes travelled back to the clock. She always thought of Clem Spender when she looked at the clock, and sud¬ denly she wondered — if things had been different — what he would have said if she had made such an appeal to him as Char¬ lotte had made to Joe. The thing was haid to imagine; yet in a flash of mental readjustment Delia saw herself as Clem’s wife, she saw her children as his, she pic¬ tured herself asking him to let her go on caring for the poor waifs in the Mercer Street stable, and she distinctly heard his laugh and his light answer: “Why on earth did you ask, you little goose? Do you take me for such a Pharisee as that?”

Yes, that was Clem Spender all over — tolerant, reckless, indifferent to conse¬ quences, always doing the kind thing at [36]

THE OLD MAID

the moment, and too often leaving others to pay the score. “There’s something cheap about Clem,” Jim had once said in his heavy way. Delia Ralston roused herself and pressed her cousin closer. “Chatty, tell me,” she whispered.

“There’s nothing more.”

“I mean, about yourself . . . this thing . . . this. . . ” Clem Spender’s voice was still in her ears. “You loved some one,” she breathed.

“Yes. That’s over — . Now it’s only the child. . . And I could love Joe — in another way.” Chatty Lovell straight¬ ened herself, wan and frowning.

“I need the money — I must have it for my baby. Or else they’ll send it to an Institution.” She paused. “But that’s not all. I want to marry — to be a wife, like all of you. I should have loved Joe’s

[37]

THE OLD MAID

children — our children. Life doesn’t stop . .

“No; I suppose not. But you speak as if ... as if .. . the person who took advantage of you . . .”

“No one took advantage of me. I was lonely and unhappy. I met some one who was lonely and unhappy. People don’t all have your luck. We were both too poor to marry each other . . . and mother would never have consented. And so one day . . . one day before he said goodbye . . .”

“He said goodbye?”

“Yes. He was going to leave the coun¬ try.”

“He left the country — knowing?”

“How was he to know? He doesn’t live here. He’d just come back — come back to see his family — for a few weeks . . ” [38]

THE OLD MAID

She broke off, her thin lips pressed to¬ gether upon her secret.

There was a silence. Blindly Delia stared at the bold shepherd.

“Come back from where?” she asked at length in a low tone.

“Oh, what does it matter? You wouldn’t understand,” Charlotte broke off, in the very words her married cousin had com¬ passionately addressed to her virginity.

A slow blush rose to Delia’s cheek : she felt oddly humiliated by the rebuke con¬ veyed in that contemptuous retort. She seemed to herself shy, ineffectual, as incapable as an ignorant girl of dealing with the abominations that Charlotte was thrusting on her. But suddenly some fierce feminine intuition struggled and woke in her. She forced her eyes upon her cousin’s.

[39]

THE OLD MAID

“You won’t tell me who it was?”

“What’s the use? I haven’t told any¬ body.”

“Then why have you come to me?”

Charlotte’s stony face broke up in weeping. “It’s for my baby . . . my baby . .

Delia did not heed her. “How can I help you if I don’t know?” she insisted in a harsh dry voice: her heart-beats were so violent that they seemed to send up throt¬ tling hands to her throat.

Charlotte made no answer.

“Come back from where?” Delia dog¬ gedly repeated; and at that, with a long wail, the girl flung her hands up, screen¬ ing her eyes. “He always thought you’d wait for him,” she sobbed out, “and then, when he found you hadn’t . . . and that you were marrying Jim. . . He heard [ 40 ]

THE OLD MAID

it just as he was sailing. . . He didn’t know it till Mrs. Mingott asked him to bring the clock back for your wedding . . .”

“Stop — stop,’’ Delia cried, springing to her feet. She had provoked the avowal, and now that it had come she felt that it had been gratuitously and indecently thrust upon her. Was this New York, her New York, her safe friendly hypo¬ critical New York, was this James Ral¬ ston’s house, and this his wife listening to such revelations of dishonour?

Charlotte Lovell stood up in her turn. “I knew it — I knew it! You think worse of my baby now, instead of better. . . Oh, why did you make me tell you? I knew you’d never understand. I’d always cared for him, ever since I came out; that was why I wouldn’t marry any one else. But I knew there was no hope for me . . .

[41]

THE OLD MAID

he never looked at anybody but you. And then, when he came back four years ago, and there was no you for him any more, he began to notice me, to be kind, to talk to me about his life and his painting. . . She drew a deep breath, and her voice cleared. “That’s over — all over. It’s as if I couldn’t either hate him or love him. There’s only the child now — my child. He doesn’t even know of it — why should he? It’s none of his business; it’s nobody’s business but mine. But surely you must see that I can’t give up my baby.”

Delia Ralston stood speechless, looking away from her cousin in a growing horror. She had lost all sense of reality, all feeling of safety and self-reliance. Her impulse was to close her ears to the other’s appeal as a child buries its head from midnight terrors. At last she drew herself up, and spoke with dry lips.

[42]

THE OLD MAID

“But what do you mean to do? Why have you come to me? Why have you told me all this?”

“Because he loved you!” Charlotte Lovell stammered out; and the two women stood and faced each other.

Slowly the tears rose to Delia’s eyes and rolled down her cheeks, moistening her parched lips. Through the tears she saw her cousin’s haggard countenance waver and droop like a drowning face under water. Things half-guessed, obscurely felt, surged up from unsuspected depths in her. It was almost as if, for a moment, this other woman were telling her of her own secret past, putting into crude words all the trembling silences of her own heart.

The worst of it was, as Charlotte said, that they must act now; there was not a day to lose. Chatty was right — it was

[43]

THE OLD MAID

impossible that she should marry Joe if to do so meant giving up the child. Butv in any case, how could she marry him without telling him the truth? And was it conceivable that, after hearing it, he should not repudiate her? All these ques¬ tions spun agonizingly through Delia’s brain, and through them glimmered the persistent vision of the child — Clem Spen¬ der’s child — growing up on charity in a negro hovel, or herded in one of the plague-houses they called Asylums. No: the child came first— she felt it in every fibre of her body. But what should she do, of whom take counsel, how advise the wretched creature who had come to her in Clement’s name? Delia glanced about her desperately, and then turned back to her cousin.

“You must give me time. I must think [ 44 ]

THE OLD MAID

Y ou ought not to marry him — and yet all the arrangements are made ; and the wedding-presents. . . There would be a scandal ... it would kill Granny Lovell . . .”

Charlotte answered in a low voice : “There is no time. I must decide now.”

Delia pressed her hands against her breast. “I tell you I must think. I wish you would go home. — Or, no: stay here: your mother mustn’t see your eyes. Jim’s not coming home till late; you can wait in this room till I come hack.” She had opened the wardrobe and was reaching up for a plain bonnet and heavy veil.

“Stay here? But where are you going?”

“I don’t know. I want to walk— to get the air. I think I want to be alone.” Feverishly, Delia unfolded her Paisley shawl, tied on bonnet and veil, thrust her

[45]

THE OLD MAID

mittened hands into her muff. Charlotte, without moving, stared at her dumbly from the sofa.

“You’ll wait,” Delia insisted, on the threshold.

“Yes: I’ll wait.”

Delia shut the door and hurried down the stairs.

Ill

QHE had spoken the truth in saying that she did not know where she was going. She simply wanted to get away from Charlotte’s unbearable face, and from the immediate atmosphere of her tragedy. Outside, in the open, perhaps it would be easier to think.

As she skirted the park-rails she saw her rosy children playing, under their nurse’s eye, with the pampered progeny of other square-dwellers. The little girl had on her new plaid velvet bonnet and white tippet, and the boy his Highland cap and broad-cloth spencer. How happy and jolly they looked! The nurse spied

[47]

THE OLD MAID

her, but she shook her head, waved at the group and hurried on.

She walked and walked through the familiar streets decked with bright winter sunshine. It was early afternoon, an hour when the gentlemen had just returned to their offices, and there were few pedes¬ trians in Irving Place and Union Square. Delia crossed the Square to Broadway.

The Lovell house in Mercer Street was a sturdy old-fashioned brick dwelling. A large stable adjoined it, opening on an alley such as Delia, on her honey-moon trip to England, had heard called a “mews.” She turned into the alley, en¬ tered the stable court, and pushed open a door. In a shabby white-washed room a dozen children, gathered about a stove, were playing with broken toys. The Irish¬ woman who had charge of them was cut¬ ting out small garments on a broken- [48]

THE OLD MAID

legged deal table. She raised a friendly face, recognizing Delia as the lady who had once or twice been to see the children with Miss Charlotte.

Delia paused, embarrassed.

“I — I came to ask if you need any new toys,” she stammered.

“That we do, ma’am. And many an¬ other thing too, though Miss Charlotte tells me I’m not to beg- of the ladies that comes to see our poor darlin’s.”

“Oh, you may beg of me, Bridget,” Mrs. Ralston answered, smiling. “Let me see your babies — it’s so long since I’ve been here.”

The children had stopped playing and, huddled against their nurse, gazed up open-mouthed at the rich rustling lady. One little girl with pale brown eyes and scarlet cheeks was dressed in a plaid alpaca frock trimmed with imitation coral

[ 49 ]

THE OLD MAID

buttons that Delia remembered. Those buttons had been on Charlotte’s “best dress” the year she came out. Delia stopped and took up the child. Its curly hair was brown, the exact colour of the eyes — thank heaven! But the eyes had the same little green spangles floating in their transparency. Delia sat down, and the little girl, standing on her knee, gravely fingered her watch-chain.

“Oh, ma’am — maybe her shoes’ll soil your skirt. The floor here ain’t none too clean.”

Delia shook her head, and pressed the child against her. She had forgotten the other gazing babies and their wardress. The little creature on her knee was made of different stuff — it had not needed the plaid alpaca and coral buttons to single her out. Her brown curls grew in points on her high forehead, exactly as Clement [50]

THE OLD MAID

Spender’s did. Delia laid a burning cheek against the forehead.

“Baby want my lovely yellow chain?”

Baby did.

Delia unfastened the gold chain and hung it about the child’s neck. The other babies clapped and crowed, but the little girl, gravely dimpling, continued to finger the links in silence.

“Oh, ma’am, you can’t leave that fine chain on little Teeny. When she has to go back to those blacks . .

“What is her name?”

“Teena they call her, I believe. It don’t seem a Christian name, har’ly.”

Delia was silent.

“What I say is, her cheeks is too red. And she coughs too easy. Always one cold and another. Here, Teeny, leave the lady go.”

[51]

THE OLD MAID

Delia stood up, loosening the tender arms.

“She doesn’t want to leave go of you, ma’am. Miss Chatty ain’t been in today, and the little thing’s kinder lonesome without her. She don’t play like the other children, somehow. . . Teeny, you look at that lovely chain you’ve got . . . there, there now . . .”

“Goodbye, Clementina,” Delia whis¬ pered below her breath. She kissed the pale brown eyes, the curly crown, and dropped her veil on rushing tears. In the stable-yard she dried them on her large embroidered handkerchief, and stood hesi¬ tating. Then with a decided step she turned toward home.

The house was as she had left it, except that the children had come in; she heard them romping in the nursery as she went down the passage to her bedroom. Char- [52]

THE OLD MAID

lotte Lovell was seated on the sofa, up¬ right and rigid, as Delia had left her.

“Chatty — Chatty, I’ve thought it out. Listen. Whatever happens, the baby shan’t stay with those people. I mean to keep her.”

Charlotte stood up, tall and white. The eyes in her thin face had grown so dark that they seemed like spectral hollows in a skull. She opened her lips to speak, and then, snatching at her handkerchief, pressed it to her mouth, and sank down again. A red trickle dripped through the handkerchief onto her poplin skirt.

“Charlotte — Charlotte,” Delia screamed, on her knees beside her cousin. Charlotte’s head slid back against the cushions and the trickle ceased. She closed her eyes, and Delia, seizing a vinaigrette from the dressing-table, held it to her pinched nos-

[53]

THE OLD MAID

trils. The room was filled with an acrid aromatic scent.

Charlotte’s lids lifted. “Don’t be fright¬ ened. I still spit blood sometimes — not often. My lung is nearly healed. But it’s the terror — ”

“No, no: there’s to be no more terror. I tell you I’ve thought it all out. Jim is going to let me take the baby.”

The girl raised herself haggardly. “Jim? Have you told him? Is that where you’ve been?”

“No, darling. I’ve only been to see the baby.”

“Oh,” Charlotte moaned, leaning back again. Delia took her own handkerchief, and wiped away the tears that were rain¬ ing down her cousin's cheeks.

“You mustn’t cry, Chatty; you must be brave. Your little girl and his — how could you think? But you must give me time: [34]

THE OLD MAID

I must manage it in my own way. . . Only trust me . .

Charlotte’s lips stirred faintly.

“The tears . . . don’t dry them, Delia.

. . . I like to feel them . . .”

The two cousins continued to lean against each other without speaking. The ormolu clock ticked out the measure of their mute communion in minutes, quar¬ ters, a half-hour, then an hour: the day declined and darkened, the shadows lengthened across the garlands of the Axminster and the broad white bed. There was a knock.

“The children’s waiting to say their grace before supper, ma’am.”

“Yes, Eliza. Let them say it to you. I’ll come later.” As the nurse’s steps receded Charlotte Lovell disengaged her¬ self from Delia’s embrace.

“Now I can go,” she said.

[55]

THE OLD MAID

“You’re not too weak, dear? I can send for a coach to take you home.”

“No, no; it would frighten mother. And I shall like walking now, in the dark¬ ness. Sometimes the world used to seem all one awful glare to me. There were days when I thought the sun would never set. And then there was the moon at night.” She laid her hands on her cousin’s shoulders. “Now it’s different. By and bye I shan’t hate the light.”

The two women kissed each other, and Delia whispered: “Tomorrow.”

IV

fTIHE Ralstons gave up old customs reluctantly, but once they had adopted a new one they found it impos¬ sible to understand why everyone else did not immediately do likewise.

When Delia, who came of the laxer Lovells, and was naturally inclined to novelty, had first proposed to her husband to dine at six o’clock instead of two, his malleable young face had become as relentless as that of the old original Ral¬ ston in his grim Colonial portrait. But after a two days’ resistance he had come round to his wife’s view, and now smiled contemptuously at the obstinacy of those

[57]

THE OLD MAID

who clung to a heavy mid-day meal and high tea.

“There’s nothing I hate like narrow¬ mindedness. Let people eat when they like, for all I care : it’s their narrow-mind¬ edness that I can’t stand.”

Delia was thinking of this as she sat in the drawing-room (her mother would have called it the parlour) waiting for her husband’s return. She had just had time to smooth her glossy braids, and slip on the black-and-white striped moire with cherry pipings which was his favourite dress. The drawing-room, with its Not¬ tingham lace curtains looped back under florid gilt cornices, its marble centre-table on a carved rosewood foot, and its old- fashioned mahogany armchairs covered with one of the new French silk damasks in a tart shade of apple-green, was one for any young wife to be proud of. The [58]

THE OLD MAID

rosewood what-nots on each side of the folding doors that led into the dining¬ room were adorned with tropical shells, f eld-spar vases, an alabaster model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, a pair of obelisks made of scraps of porphyry and serpen¬ tine picked up by the young couple in the Roman Forum, a bust of Clytie in chalk-white biscuit de Sevres, and four old-fashioned figures of the Seasons in Chelsea ware, that had to be left among the newer ornaments because they had belonged to great-grandmamma Ralston. On the walls hung large dark steel-en¬ gravings of Cole’s “Voyage of Life,” and between the windows stood the life-size statue of “A Captive Maiden” executed for Jim Ralston’s father by the celebrated Harriet Hosmer, immortalized in Haw¬ thorne’s novel of the Marble Faun. On the table lay handsomely tooled copies of

[59]

THE OLD MAID

Turner’s Rivers of France, Drake’s Cul¬ prit Fay, Crabbe’s Tales, and the Book of Beauty containing portraits of the British peeresses who had participated in the Earl of Eglinton’s tournament.

As Delia sat there, before the hard-coal fire in its arched opening of black marble, her citron-wood work-table at her side, and one of the new French lamps shedding a pleasant light on the centre-table from under a crystal-fringed shade, she asked herself how she could have passed, in such a short time, so completely out of her usual circle of impressions and convictions — so much farther than ever before beyond the Ralston horizon. Here it was, closing in on her again, as if the very plaster orna¬ ments of the ceiling, the forms of the fur¬ niture, the cut of her dress, had been built out of Ralston prejudices, and turned to adamant by the touch of Ralston hands. [60]

THE OLD MAID

She must have been mad, she thought, to have committed herself so far to Char¬ lotte; yet, turn about as she would in the ever-tightening circle of the problem, she could still find no other issue. Somehow, it lay with her to save Clem Spender’s baby.

She heard the sound of the latch-key (her heart had never beat so high at it), and the putting down of a tall hat on the hall console — or of two tall hats, was it? The drawing-room door opened, and two high-stocked and ample-coated young men came in: two Jim Ralstons, so to speak. Delia had never before noticed how much her husband and his cousin Joe were alike; it made her feel how justified she was in always thinking of the Ralstons collectively.

She would not have been young and tender, and a happy wife, if she had not

[61]

THE OLD MAID

thought Joe but an indifferent copy of her Jim ; yet, allowing for defects in the repro¬ duction, there remained a striking likeness between the two tall athletic figures, the short sanguine faces with straight noses, straight whiskers, straight brows, candid blue eyes and sweet selfish smiles. Only, at the present moment, Joe looked like Jim with a tooth-ache.

“Look here, my dear: here’s a young man who’s asked to take pot-luck with us,” Jim smiled, with the confidence of a well-nourished husband who knows that he can always bring a friend home.

“How nice of you, Joe! — Do you sup¬ pose he can put up with oyster soup and a stuffed goose?” Delia beamed upon her husband.

“I knew it! I told you so, my dear chap ! He said you wouldn’t like it — that you’d be fussed about the dinner. Wait [62]

THE OLD MAID

till you’re married, Joseph Ralston — Jim brought down a genial paw on his cousin's bottle-green shoulder, and Joe grimaced as if the tooth had stabbed him.

“It’s excessively kind of you, cousin Delia, to take me in this evening. The fact is — ”

“Dinner first, my boy, if you don’t mind! A bottle of Burgundy will brush away the blue devils. Your arm to your cousin, please; I’ll just go and see that the wine is brought up.”

Oyster soup, broiled bass, stuffed goose, apple fritters and green peppers, followed by one of Grandmamma Ral¬ ston’s famous caramel custards: through all her mental anguish, Delia was faintly aware of a secret pride in her achievement. Certainly it would serve to confirm the rumour that Jim Ralston could always

[63]

THE OLD MAID

bring a friend home to dine without notice. The Ralston and Lovell wines rounded off the effect, and even Joe’s drawn face had mellowed by the time the Lovell Madeira started westward. Delia marked the change when the two young men re¬ joined her in the drawing-room.

“And now, my dear fellow, you’d better tell her the whole story,” Jim counselled, pushing an armchair toward his cousin.

The young woman, bent above her wool-work, listened with lowered lids and flushed cheeks. As a married woman — as a mother — Joe hoped she would think him justified in speaking to her frankly: he had her husband’s authority to do so.

“Oh, go ahead, go ahead,” chafed the exuberant after-dinner Jim from the hearth-rug.

Delia listened, considered, let the bride¬ groom flounder on through his embar- [64]

THE OLD MAID

rassed exposition. Her needle hung like a sword of Damocles above the canvas; she saw at once that Joe depended on her trying to win Charlotte over to his way of thinking. But he was very much in love : at a word from Delia, she understood that he would yield, and Charlotte gain her point, save the child, and marry him . . .

How easy it was, after all! A friendly welcome, a good dinner, a ripe wine, and the memory of Charlotte’s eyes — so much the more expressive for all that they had looked upon. A secret envy stabbed the wife who had lacked this last enlighten¬ ment.

How easy it was — and yet it must not be! Whatever happened, she could not let Charlotte Lovell marry Joe Ralston. All the traditions of honour and probity in which she had been brought up forbade her to connive at such a plan. She could

[65]

THE OLD MAID

conceive — had already conceived — of high¬ handed measures, swift and adroit defi¬ ances of precedent, subtle revolts against the heartlessness of the social routine. But a lie she could never connive at. The idea of Charlotte’s marrying Joe Ralston — her own Jim’s cousin — without revealing her past to him, seemed to Delia as dishonour¬ able as it would have seemed to any Ral¬ ston. And to tell him the truth would at once put an end to the marriage; of that even Chatty was aware. Social tolerance was not dealt in the same measure to men and to women, and neither Delia nor Charlotte had ever wondered why: like all the young women of their class they simply bowed to the ineluctable.

No; there was no escape from the dilemma. As clearly as it was Delia’s duty to save Clem Spender’s child, so clearly, also, she seemed destined to sacri- [66]

THE OLD MAID

fice his mistress. As the thought pressed on her she remembered Charlotte’s wistful cry: “I want to be married, like all of you,'' and her heart tightened. But yet it must not be.

“I make every allowance” (Joe was droning on) “for my sweet girl’s igno¬ rance and inexperience — for her lovely purity. How could a man wish his future wife to be — to be otherwise? You’re with me, Jim? And Delia? I’ve told her, you understand, that she shall always have a special sum set apart for her poor children — in addition to her pin-money; on that she may absolutely count. God! I’m willing to draw up a deed, a settlement, before a lawyer, if she says so. I admire, I appreciate her generosity. But I ask you, Delia, as a mother — mind you, now, I want your frank opinion. If you think I can stretch a point — can let her go on

[67]

THE OLD MAID

giving her personal care to these children until . . . until ...” A flush of pride suffused the potential father’s brow . . . “till nearer duties claim her, why, I’m more than ready ... if you’ll tell her so. I undertake,” Joe proclaimed, suddenly tingling with the memory of his last glass, “to make it right with my mother, whose prejudices, of course, while I respect them, I can never allow to — to come be¬ tween me and my own convictions.” He sprang to his feet, and beamed on his dauntless double in the chimney-mirror. “My convictions,” he flung back at it.

“Hear, hear!” cried Jim emotionally.

Delia’s needle gave the canvas a sharp prick, and she pushed her work aside.

“I think I understand you both, Joe. Certainly, in Charlotte’s place, I could never give up those children.”

“There you are, my dear fellow!” Jim

[68]

THE OLD MAID

triumphed, as proud of this vicarious cour¬ age as of the perfection of the dinner.

“Never,” said Delia. “Especially, I mean, the foundlings — there are two, I think. Those children always die if they are sent to asylums. That is what is haunt¬ ing Chatty.”

“Poor innocents! How I love her for loving them! That there should be such scoundrels upon this earth unpunished — . Delia, will you tell her that I’ll do what¬ ever — ”

“Gently, old man, gently,” Jim admon¬ ished him, with a flash of Ralston caution.

“Well, that is to say, whatever — in reason — ”

Delia lifted an arresting hand. “I’ll tell her, Joe: she will be grateful. But it’s of no use — ”

“No use? What more — ?”

“Nothing more: except this. Charlotte

[69]

THE OLD MAID

has had a return of her old illness. She coughed blood here today. You must not marry her.”

There: it was done. She stood up, trembling in every bone, and feeling her¬ self pale to the lips. Had she done right? Had she done wrong? And would she ever know?

Poor Joe turned on her a face as wan as hers: he clutched the back of his arm¬ chair, his head drooping forward like an old man’s. His lips moved, but made no sound.

“My God!” Jim stammered. “But you know you’ve got to buck up, old boy.”

“I’m — I’m so sorry for you, Joe. She’ll tell you herself tomorrow,” Delia faltered, while her husband continued to proffer heavy consolations.

“Take it like a man, old chap. Think of yourself — your future. Can’t be, you [70]

THE OLD MAID

know. Delia’s right; she always is. Bet¬ ter get it over — better face the music now than later.”

“Now than later,” Joe echoed with a tortured grin; and it occurred to Delia that never before in the course of his easy good-natured life had he had — any more than her Jim — to give up anything his heart was set on. Even the vocabulary of renunciation, and its conventional ges¬ tures, were unfamiliar to him.

“But I don’t understand. I can’t give her up,” he declared, blinking away a boy¬ ish tear.

“Think of the children, my dear fellow; it’s your duty,” Jim insisted, checking a glance of pride at Delia’s wholesome comeliness.

In the long conversation that followed between the cousins — argument, counter¬ argument, sage counsel and hopeless pro-

[71]

THE OLD MAID

test — Delia took but an occasional part. She knew well enough what the end would be. The bridegroom who had feared that his bride might bring home contagion from her visits to the poor would not knowingly implant disease in his race. Nor was that all. Too many sad instances of mothers prematurely fading, and leaving their hus¬ bands alone with a young flock to rear, must be pressing upon Joe’s memory. Ralstons, Lovells, Lannings, Archers, van der Luydens — which one of them had not some grave to care for in a distant ceme¬ tery: graves of young relatives “in a de¬ cline,” sent abroad to be cured by balmy Italy? The Protestant grave-yards of Rome and Pisa were full of New York names; the vision of that familiar pilgrim¬ age with a dying wife was one to turn the most ardent Ralston cold. And all the while, as she listened with bent head, Deha [72]

THE OLD MAID

kept repeating to herself: “This is easy; but how am I going to tell Charlotte?”

When poor Joe, late that evening, wrung her hand with a stammered fare¬ well, she called him back abruptly from the threshold.

“You must let me see her first, please; you must wait till she sends for you — ” and she winced a little at the alacrity of his acceptance. But no amount of rhetor¬ ical bolstering-up could make it easy for a young man to face what lay ahead of Joe; and her final glance at him was one of compassion . . .

The front door closed upon Joe, and she was roused by her husband’s touch on her shoulder.

“I never admired you more, darling. My wise Delia!”

Her head bent back, she took his kiss,

[73]

THE OLD MAID

and then drew apart. The sparkle in his eyes she understood to be as much an in¬ vitation to her bloom as a tribute to her sagacity.

She held him at arms’ length. “What should you have done, Jim, if I’d had to tell you about myself what I’ve just told Joe about Chatty?”

A slight frown showed that he thought the question negligible, and hardly in her usual taste. “Come,” his strong arm en¬ treated her.

She continued to stand away from him, with grave eyes. “Poor Chatty! Nothing left now — ”

His own eyes grew grave, in instant sympathy. At such moments he was still the sentimental boy whom she could manage.

“Ah, poor Chatty, indeed!” He groped for the readiest panacea. “Lucky, now, [74]

THE OLD MAID

after all, that she has those paupers, isn’t it? I suppose a woman must have chil¬ dren to love — somebody else’s if not her own.” It was evident that the thought of the remedy had already relieved his pain.

“Yes,” Delia agreed, “I see no other comfort for her. I’m sure Joe will feel that too. Between us, darling — ” and now she let him have her hands — “between us, you and I must see to it that she keeps her babies.”

“Her babies?” He smiled at the pos¬ sessive pronoun. “Of course, poor girl! Unless indeed she’s sent to Italy?”

“Oh, she won’t be that — where’s the money to come from? And, besides, she’d never leave Aunt Lovell. But I thought, dear, if I might tell her tomorrow — you see, I’m not exactly looking forward to my talk with her — if I might tell her that you would let me look after the baby she’s

[75]

THE OLD MAID

most worried about, the poor little found¬ ling girl who has no name and no home — if I might put aside a fixed sum from my pin-money . .

Their hands flowed together, she lifted her flushing face to his. Manly tears were in his eyes; ah, how he triumphed in her health, her wisdom, her generosity!

“Not a penny from your pin-money — never!”

She feigned discouragement and won¬ der. “Think, dear — if I’d had to give you up!”

“Not a penny from your pin-money, I say — but as much more as you need, to help poor Chatty’s pauper. There — will that content you?”

“Dearest! When I think of our own, upstairs!” They held each other, awed by that evocation.

[76]

y

CHARLOTTE LOVELL, at the sound of her cousin’s step, lifted a fevered face from the pillow.

The bedroom, dim and close, smelt of eau de Cologne and fresh linen. Delia, blinking in from the bright winter sun, had to feel her way through a twilight ob¬ structed by dark mahogany.

“I want to see your face, Chatty: un¬ less your head aches too much?”

Charlotte signed “No,” and Delia drew back the heavy window curtains and let in a ray of light. In it she saw the girl’s head, livid against the bed-linen, the brick- rose circles again visible under darkly shadowed lids. Just so, she remembered,

[77]

THE OLD MAID

poor cousin So-and-so had looked the week before she sailed for Italy!

“Delia!” Charlotte breathed.

Delia drew near the bed, and stood look¬ ing down at her cousin with new eyes. Yes: it had been easy enough, the night before, to dispose of Chatty’s future as if it were her own. But now?

“Darling—”

“Oh, begin, please,” the girl inter¬ rupted, “or I shall know that what’s com¬ ing is too dreadful !”

“Chatty, dearest, if I promised you too much — ”

“Jim won’t let you take my child? I knew it! Shall I always go on dreaming things that can never be?”

Delia, her tears running down, knelt by the bed and gave her fresh hand into the other’s burning clutch.

[78]

THE OLD MAID

“Don’t think that, dear: think only of what you’d like best . .

“Like best?” The girl sat up sharply against her pillows, alive to the hot finger¬ tips.

“You can’t marry Joe, dear — can you — and keep little Tina?” Delia continued.

“Not keep her with me, no: but some¬ where where I could slip off to see her — oh, I had hoped such follies!”

“Give up follies, Charlotte. Keep her where? See your own child in secret? Always in dread of disgrace? Of wrong to your other children? Have you ever thought of that?”

“Oh, my poor head won’t think ! You’re trying to tell me that I must give her up ?”

“No, dear; but that you must not marry Joe.”

Charlotte sank back on the pillow, her eyes half -closed. “I tell you I must make

[79]

THE OLD MAID

my child a home. Delia, you’re too blest to understand!”

“Think yourself blest too, Chatty. You shan’t give up your baby. She shall live with you : you shall take care of her — for me.”

“For you?”

“I promised you I’d take her, didn’t I? But not that you should marry Joe. Only that I would make a home for your baby. Well, that’s done; you two shall be always together.”

Charlotte clung to her and sobbed. “But Joe — I can’t tell him, I can’t!” She put back Delia suddenly. “You haven’t told him of my — of my baby? I couldn’t bear to hurt him as much as that.”

“I told him that you coughed blood yes¬ terday. He’ll see you presently: he’s dreadfully unhappy. He has been given to understand that, in view of your bad [80]

THE OLD MAID

health, the engagement is broken by your wish — and he accepts your decision; but if he weakens, or if you weaken, I can do nothing for you or for little Tina. For heaven’s sake remember that!”

Delia released her hold, and Charlotte leaned back silent, with closed eyes and narrowed lips. Almost like a corpse she lay there. On a chair near the bed hung the poplin with red velvet ribbons which had been made over in honour of her betrothal. A pair of new slippers of bronze kid peeped from beneath it. Poor Chatty! She had hardly had time to be pretty . . .

Delia sat by the bed motionless, her eyes on her cousin’s closed face. They fol¬ lowed the course of a tear that forced a way between Charlotte’s tight lids, hung on the lashes, glittered slowly down the

[81]

THE OLD MAID

cheeks. As the tear reached the narrowed lips they spoke.

“Shall I live with her somewhere, do you mean? Just she and I together?”

“Just you and she.”

“In a little house?”

“In a little house . . .”

“You’re sure, Delia?”

“Sure, my dearest.”

Charlotte once more raised herself on her elbow and sent a hand groping under the pillow. She drew out a narrow ribbon on which hung a diamond ring.

“I had taken it off already,” she said simply, and handed it to Delia.

PART II

VI

OU could always have told, every one

agreed afterward, that Charlotte Lovell was meant to be an old maid. Even before her illness it had been manifest: there was something prim about her in spite of her fiery hair. Lucky enough for her, poor girl, considering her wretched health in her youth: Mrs. James Ralston’s contemporaries, for instance, remembered Charlotte as a mere ghost, coughing her lungs out — that, of course, had been the reason for her breaking her engagement with Joe Ralston.

True, she had recovered very rapidly, m spite of the peculiar treatment she was given. The Lovells, as every one knew.

[85]

THE OLD MAID

couldn’t afford to send her to Italy; the previous experiment in Georgia had been unsuccessful; and so she was packed off to a farm-house on the Hudson — a little place on the James Ralstons’ property — where she lived for five or six years with an Irish servant-woman and a foundling baby. The story of the foundling was another queer episode in Charlotte’s his¬ tory. From the time of her first illness, when she was only twenty-two or three, she had developed an almost morbid ten¬ derness for children, especially for the children of the poor. It was said — Dr. Lanskell was understood to have said — that the baffled instinct of motherhood was peculiarly intense in cases where lung- disease prevented marriage. And so, when it was decided that Chatty must break her engagement to Joe Ralston and go to live in the country, the doctor had [86]

THE OLD MAID

told her family that the only hope of sav¬ ing her lay in not separating her entirely from her pauper children, but in letting her choose one of them, the youngest and most pitiable, and devote herself to its care. So the Janies Ralstons had lent her their little farm-house, and Mrs. Jim, with her extraordinary gift of taking things in at a glance, had at once arranged every¬ thing, and even pledged herself to look after the baby if Charlotte died.

Charlotte did not die. She lived to grow robust and middle-aged, energetic and even tyrannical. And as the transforma¬ tion in her character took place she became more and more like the typical old maid: precise, methodical, absorbed in trifles, and attaching an exaggerated importance to the smallest social and domestic observ¬ ances. Such was her reputation as a vigilant house-wife that, when poor Jim

[87]

THE OLD MAID

Ralston was killed by a fall from his horse, and left Delia, still young, with a boy and girl to bring up, it seemed perfectly natu¬ ral that the heart-broken widow should take her cousin to live with her and share her task. But Delia Ralston never did things quite like other people. When she took Charlotte she took Charlotte’s found¬ ling too: a dark-haired child with pale brown eyes, and the odd incisive manner of children who have lived too much with their elders. The little girl was called Tina Lovell : it was vaguely supposed that Charlotte had adopted her. She grew up on terms of affectionate equality with her young Ralston cousins, and almost as much so — it might be said — with the two women who mothered her. But, impelled by an instinct of imitation which no one took the trouble to correct, she always called Delia Ralston “Mamma,” and [88]

THE OLD MAID

Charlotte Lovell “Aunt Chatty.” She was a brilliant and engaging creature, and people marvelled at poor Chatty’s luck in having chosen so interesting a specimen among her foundlings ( for she was by this time supposed to have had a whole asylum- full to choose from) .

The agreeable elderly bachelor, Siller- ton J ackson, returning from a prolonged sojourn in Paris (where he was under¬ stood to have been made much of by the highest personages) was immensely struck by Tina’s charms when he saw her at her coming-out ball, and asked Delia’s per¬ mission to come some evening and dine alone with her and her young people. He complimented the widow on the rosy beauty of her own young Delia; but the mother’s keen eye perceived that all the while he was watching Tina, and after din¬ ner he confided to the older ladies that

[89]

THE OLD MAID

there was something “very French’’ in the girl’s way of doing her hair, and that in the capital of all the Elegances she would have been pronounced extremely stylish.

“Oh — ” Delia deprecated, beamingly, while Charlotte Lovell sat bent over her work with pinched lips; but Tina, who had been laughing with her cousins at the other end of the room, was around upon her el¬ ders in a flash.

“I heard what Mr. Sillerton said! Yes, I did, Mamma: he says I do my hair stylishly. Didn’t I always tell you so? I know it’s more becoming to let it curl as it wants to than to plaster it down with bandoline like Aunty’s — ”

“Tina, Tina — you always think people are admiring you!” Miss Lovell protested.

“Why shouldn’t I, when they do?” the girl laughingly challenged; and, turning her mocking eyes on Sillerton Jackson: [90]

THE OLD MAID

“Do tell Aunt Charlotte not to be so dreadfully old-maidish!”

Delia saw the blood rise to Charlotte Lovell’s face. It no longer painted two brick-rose circles on her thin cheek-bones, but diffused a harsh flush over her whole countenance, from the collar fastened with an old-fashioned garnet brooch to the pepper-and-salt hair (with no trace of red left in it) flattened down over her hollow temples.

That evening, when they went up to bed, Delia called Tina into her room.

“You ought not to speak to your Aunt Charlotte as you did this evening, dear. It’s disrespectful — you must see that it hurts her.”

The girl overflowed with compunction. “Oh, I’m so sorry! Because I said she was an old maid? But she is, isn’t she, Mamma? In her inmost soul, I mean. I don’t be-

[91]

THE OLD MAID

lieve she’s ever been young — ever thought of fun or admiration or falling in love — do you? That’s why she never under¬ stands me, and you always do, you darling dear Mamma.” With one of her light movements, Tina was in the widow’s arms.

“Child, child,” Delia softly scolded, kissing the dark curls planted in five points on the girl’s forehead.

There was a soft foot-fall in the pas¬ sage, and Charlotte Lovell stood in the door. Delia, without moving, sent her a glance of welcome over Tina’s shoulder.

“Come in, Charlotte. I’m scolding Tina for behaving like a spoilt baby before Sil- lerton Jackson. What will he think of her?”

“Just what she deserves, probably,” Charlotte returned with a cold smile. Tina went toward her, and her thin lips touched the girl’s proffered forehead just where [92]

THE OLD MAID

Delia’s warm kiss had rested. “Good¬ night, child,” she said in her dry tone of dismissal.

The door closed on the two women, and Delia signed to Charlotte to take the arm¬ chair opposite to her own.

“Not so near the fire,” Miss Lovell an¬ swered. She chose a straight-backed seat, and sat down with folded hands. Delia’s eyes rested absently on the thin ringless fingers : she wondered why Charlotte never wore her mother’s jewels.

“I overheard what you were saying to Tina, Delia. You were scolding her be¬ cause she called me an old maid.”

It was Delia’s turn to colour. “I scolded her for being disrespectful, dear; if you heard what I said you can’t think that I was too severe.”

“Not too severe : no. I’ve never thought

[93]

THE OLD MAID

you too severe with Tina; on the con¬ trary.”

“You think I spoil her?”

“Sometimes.”

Delia felt an unreasoning resentment. “What was it I said that you object to?”

Charlotte returned her glance steadily. “I would rather she thought me an old maid than—”

“Oh — ” Delia murmured. With one of her quick leaps of intuition she had en¬ tered into the other’s soul, and once more measured its shuddering loneliness.

“What else,” Charlotte inexorably pur¬ sued, “can she possibly be allowed to think me — ever?”

“I see ... I see . . .” the widow fal¬ tered.

“A ridiculous narrow-minded old maid — nothing else,” Charlotte Lovell insisted, [94]

THE OLD MAID

getting to her feet, “or I shall never feel safe with her.”

“Goodnight, my dear,” Delia said com¬ passionately. There were moments when she almost hated Charlotte for being Tina’s mother, and others, such as this, when her heart was wrung by the tragic spectacle of that unavowed bond.

Charlotte seemed to have divined her thought.

“Oh, but don’t pity me! She’s mine,” she murmured, going.

VII

Delia Ralston sometimes felt

that the real events of her life did not begin until both her children had con¬ tracted — so safely and suitably — their ir¬ reproachable New York alliances. The boy had married first, choosing a Vander- grave in whose father’s bank at Albany he was to have an immediate junior partner¬ ship; and young Delia (as her mother had foreseen she would) had selected John Junius, the safest and soundest of the many young Halseys, and followed him to his parents’ house the year after her brother’s marriage.

After young Delia had left the house in Gramercy Park it was inevitable that Tina [96]

THE OLD MAID

should take the centre front of its narrow stage. Tina had reached the marriageable age, she was admired and sought after; but what hope was there of her finding a husband? The two watchful women did not propound this question to each other; but Delia Ralston, brooding over it day by day, and taking it up with her when she mounted at night to her bedroom, knew that Charlotte Lovell, at the same hour, carried the same problem with her to the floor above.

The two cousins, during their eight years of life together, had seldom openly disagreed. Indeed, it might almost have been said that there was nothing open in their relation. Delia would have had it otherwise: after they had once looked so deeply into each other’s souls it seemed un¬ natural that a veil should fall between them. But she understood that Tina’s

[97]

THE OLD MAID

ignorance of her origin must at all costs be preserved, and that Charlotte Lovell, abrupt, passionate and inarticulate, knew of no other security than to wall herself up in perpetual silence.

So far had she carried this self-imposed reticence that Mrs. Ralston was surprised at her suddenly asking, soon after young Delia’s marriage, to be allowed to move down into the small bedroom next to Tina’s that had been left vacant by the bride’s departure.

“But you’ll be so much less comfortable there, Chatty. Have you thought of that? Or is it on account of the stairs?”

“No; it’s not the stairs,” Charlotte answered with her usual bluntness. How could she avail herself of the pretext Delia offered her, when Delia knew that she still ran up and down the three flights like a girl? “It’s because I should be next to [98]

THE OLD MAID

Tina,” she said, in a low voice that jarred like an untuned string.

“Oh — very well. As you please.” Mrs. Ralston could not tell why she felt sud¬ denly irritated by the request, unless it were that she had already amused herself with the idea of fitting up the vacant room as a sitting-room for Tina. She had meant to do it in pink and pale green, like an opening flower.

“Of course, if there is any reason — ” Charlotte suggested, as if reading her thought

“None whatever; except that — well, I’d meant to surprise Tina by doing the room up as a sort of little boudoir where she could have her books and things, and see her girl friends.”

“You’re too kind, Delia; but Tina mustn’t have boudoirs,” Miss Lovell

[99]

THE OLD MAID

answered ironically, the green specks showing in her eyes.

“Very well: as you please,” Delia re¬ peated, in the same irritated tone. “I’ll have your things brought down tomor¬ row.”

Charlotte paused in the doorway. “You’re sure there’s no other reason?”

“Other reason? Why should there be?” The two women looked at each other al¬ most with hostility, and Charlotte turned to go.

The talk once over, Delia was annoyed with herself for having yielded to Char¬ lotte’s wrish. Why must it always be she who gave in, she who, after all, was the mistress of the house, and to whom both Charlotte and Tina might almost be said to owe their very existence, or at least all that made it worth having? Yet when¬ ever any question arose about the girl it [ 100]

THE OLD MAID

was invariably Charlotte who gained her point, Delia who yielded: it seemed as if Charlotte, in her mute obstinate way, were determined to take every advantage of the dependence that made it impossible for a woman of Delia’s nature to oppose her.

In truth, Delia had looked forward more than she knew to the quiet talks with Tina to which the little boudoir would have lent itself. While her own daughter in¬ habited the room, Mrs. Ralston had been in the habit of spending an hour there every evening, chatting with the two girls while they undressed, and listening to their comments on the incidents of the day. She always knew beforehand exactly what her own girl would say; but Tina’s views and opinions were a perpetual delicious shock to her. N ot that they were strange or un¬ familiar; there were moments when they seemed to well straight up from the dumb

[101]

THE OLD MAID

depths of Delia’s own past. Only they expressed feelings she had never uttered, ideas she had hardly avowed to herself : Tina sometimes said things which Delia Ralston, in far-off self-communions, had imagined herself saying to Clement Spen¬ der.

And now there would be an end to these evening talks: if Charlotte had asked to be lodged next to her daughter, might it not conceivably be because she wished them to end ? It had never before occurred to Delia that her influence over Tina might be resented; now the discovery flashed a light far down into the abyss which had always divided the two women. But a moment later Delia reproached herself for attributing feelings of jealousy to her cousin. Was it not rather to herself that she should have ascribed them? Charlotte, as Tina’s mother, had every right to wish [102]

THE OLD MAID

to be near her, near her in all senses of the word; what claim had Delia to oppose to that natural privilege? The next morn¬ ing she gave the order that Charlotte’s things should be taken down to the room next to Tina’s.

That evening, when bedtime came, Charlotte and Tina went upstairs to¬ gether ; but Delia lingered in the drawing¬ room, on the pretext of having letters to write. In truth, she dreaded to pass the threshold where, evening after evening, the fresh laughter of the two girls used to waylay her while Charlotte Lovell already slept her old-maid sleep on the floor above. A pang went through Delia at the thought that henceforth she would be cut off from this means of keeping her hold on Tina.

An hour later, when she mounted the stairs in her turn, she was guiltily con-

[ 103]

THE OLD MAID

scious of moving as noiselessly as she could along the heavy carpet of the corridor, and of pausing longer than was necessary over the putting out of the gas-jet on the landing. As she lingered she strained her ears for the sound of voices from the ad¬ joining doors behind which Charlotte and Tina slept; she would have been secretly hurt at hearing talk and laughter from within. But none came, nor was there any light beneath the doors. Evidently Char¬ lotte, in her hard methodical way, had said goodnight to her daughter, and gone straight to bed as usual. Perhaps she had never approved of Tina’s vigils, of the long undressing punctuated with mirth and confidences ; she might have asked for the room next to her daughter’s simply be¬ cause she did not want the girl to miss her “beauty sleep.”

Whenever Delia tried to explore the [ 104 ]

THE OLD MAID

secret of her cousin’s actions she re¬ turned from the adventure humiliated and abashed by the base motives she found her¬ self attributing to Charlotte. How was it that she, Delia Ralston, whose happi¬ ness had been open and avowed to the world, so often found herself envying poor Charlotte the secret of her scanted mother¬ hood? She hated herself for this move¬ ment of envy whenever she detected it, and tried to atone for it by a softened manner and a more anxious regard for Charlotte’s feelings; but the attempt was not always successful, and Delia sometimes wondered if Charlotte did not resent any show of sympathy as an indirect glance at her mis¬ fortune. The worst of suffering such as hers was that it left one sore to the gentlest touch . . .

Delia, slowly undressing before the same lace-draped toilet-glass which had

[105]

THE OLD MAID

reflected her bridal image, was turning over these thoughts when she heard a light knock. She opened the door, and there stood Tina, in a dressing-gown, her dark curls falling over her shoulders.

With a happy heart-beat Delia held out her arms.

“I had to say goodnight, Mamma,” the girl whispered.

“Of course, dear.” Delia pressed a long kiss on her lifted forehead. “Run off now, or you might disturb your aunt. You know she sleeps badly, and you must be as quiet as a mouse now she’s next to you.”

“Yes, I know,” Tina acquiesced, with a grave glance that was almost of com¬ plicity.

She asked no further question, she did not linger: lifting Delia’s hand she held it a moment against her cheek, and then stole out as noiselessly as she had come.

[ 106]

VIII

“T)UT you must see,” Charlotte Lovell insisted, laying aside the Evening Post, “that Tina has changed. You do see that?”

The two women were sitting alone by the drawing-room fire in Gramercy Park. Tina had gone to dine with her cousin, young Mrs. John Junius Halsey, and was to be taken afterward to a ball at the Vandergraves’, from which the John Juniuses had promised to see her home. Mrs. Ralston and Charlotte, their early dinner finished, had the long evening to themselves. Their custom, on such occa¬ sions, was for Charlotte to read the news aloud to her cousin, while the latter em-

[ 107 ]

THE OLD MAID

broidered; but tonight, all through Char¬ lotte’s conscientious progress from col¬ umn to column, without a slip or an omis¬ sion, Delia had felt her, for some special reason, alert to take advantage of her daughter’s absence.

To gain time before answering, Mrs. Ralston bent over a stitch in her delicate white embroidery.

“Tina changed? Since when?” she questioned.

The answer flashed out instantly. “Since Lanning Halsey has been coming here so much.”

“Lanning? I used to think he came for Delia,” Mrs. Ralston mused, speaking at random to gain still more time.

“It’s natural you should suppose that every one came for Delia,” Charlotte re¬ joined dryly; “but as Lanning continues [ 108]

THE OLD MAID

to seek every chance of being with Tina—”

Mrs. Ralston raised her head and stole a swift glance at her cousin. She had in truth noticed that Tina had changed, as a flower changes at the mysterious moment when the unopened petals flush from with¬ in. The girl had grown handsomer, shyer, more silent, at times more irrelevantly gay. But Delia had not associated these varia¬ tions of mood with the presence of Lan- ning Halsey, one of the numerous youths who had haunted the house before young Delia’s marriage. There had, indeed, been a moment when Mrs. Ralston’s eye had been fixed, with a certain apprehension, on the handsome Lanning. Among all the sturdy and stolid Halsey cousins he was the only one to whom a prudent mother might have hesitated to entrust her daugh¬ ter; it would have been hard to say why,

[ 109 ]

THE OLD MAID

except that he was handsomer and more conversable than the rest, chronically un¬ punctual, and totally unperturbed by the fact. Clem Spender had been like that; and what if young Delia — ?

But young Delia’s mother was speedily reassured. The girl, herself arch and ap¬ petizing, took no interest in the cor¬ responding graces except when backed by more solid qualities. A Ralston to the core, she demanded the Ralston virtues, and chose the Halsey most worthy of a Ralston bride.

Mrs. Ralston felt that Charlotte was waiting for her to speak. “It will be hard to get used to the idea of Tina’s marry¬ ing,” she said gently. “I don’t know what we two old women shall do, alone in this empty house— for it will be an empty house then. But I suppose we ought to face the idea.”

[110]

THE OLD MAID

“I do face it,” said Charlotte Lovell gravely.

“And you dislike Lanning? I mean, as a husband for Tina?”

Miss Lovell folded the evening paper, and stretched out a thin hand for her knit¬ ting. She glanced across the citron-wood work-table at her cousin. “Tina must not be too difficult — ” she began.

“Oh — ” Delia protested, reddening.

“Let us call things by their names,” the other evenly pursued. “That’s my way, when I speak at all. Usually, as you know, I say nothing.”

The widow made a sign of assent, and Charlotte went on: “It’s better so. But I’ve always known a time would come when we should have to talk this thing out.”

“Talk this thing out? You and I? What thing?”

[ 111 ]

THE OLD MAID

“Tina’s future.”

There was a silence. Delia Ralston, who always responded instantly to the least appeal to her sincerity, breathed a deep sigh of relief. At last the ice in Charlotte’s breast was breaking up !

“My dear,” Delia murmured, “you know how much Tina’s happiness concerns me. If you disapprove of Lanning Hal¬ sey as a husband, have you any other can¬ didate in mind?”

Miss Lovell smiled one of her faint hard smiles. “I am not aware that there is a queue at the door. Nor do I disapprove of Lanning Halsey as a husband. Person¬ ally, I find him very agreeable ; I under¬ stand his attraction for Tina.”

“Ah — Tina is attracted?”

“Yes.”

Mrs. Ralston pushed aside her work and thoughtfully considered her cousin’s [112]

THE OLD MAID

sharply-lined face. Never had Charlotte Lovell more completely presented the typical image of the old maid than as she sat there, upright on her straight-backed chair, with narrowed elbows and clicking needles, and imperturbably discussed her daughter’s marriage.

“I don’t understand, Chatty. What¬ ever Lanning’s faults are — and I don’t be¬ lieve they’re grave — I share your liking for him. After all — ” Mrs. Ralston paused- — “what is it that people find so reprehensible in him? Chiefly, as far as I can hear, that he can’t decide on the choice of a profession. The New York view about that is rather narrow, as we know. Young men may have other tastes . . . artistic . . . literary . . . they may even have difficulty in deciding . . .”

Both women coloured slightly, and Delia guessed that the same reminiscence

[ D3]

THE OLD MAID

which shook her own bosom also throbbed under Charlotte’s strait bodice.

Charlotte spoke. “Yes: I understand that. But hesitancy about a profession may cause hesitancy about . . . other de¬ cisions . .

“What do you mean? Surely not that Lanning — ?”

“Lanning has not asked Tina to marry him.”

“And you think he’s hesitating?”

Charlotte paused. The steady click of her needles punctuated the silence as once, years before, it had been punctuated by the tick of the Parisian clock on Delia’s mantel. As Delia’s memory fled back to that scene she felt its mysterious tension in the air.

Charlotte spoke. “Lanning is not hesi¬ tating any longer: he has decided not to

[ Hi]

THE OLD MAID

marry Tina. But he has also decided — not to give up seeing her.”

Delia flushed abruptly; she was irritated and bewildered by Charlotte’s oracular phrases, doled out between parsimonious lips.

“You don’t mean that he has offered himself and then drawn back? I can’t think him capable of such an insult to Tina.”

“He has not insulted Tina. He has simply told her that he can’t afford to marry. Until he chooses a profession his father will allow him only a few hundred dollars a year ; and that may be suppressed if — if he marries against his parents’ wishes.”

It was Delia’s turn to be silent. The past was too overwhelmingly resuscitated in Charlotte’s words. Clement Spender stood before her, irresolute, impecunious,

[115]

THE OLD MAID

persuasive. Ah, if only she had let herself be persuaded!

“I’m very sorry that this should have happened to Tina. But as Lanning ap¬ pears to have behaved honourably, and withdrawn without raising false expec¬ tations, we must hope ... we must hope. . . ” Delia paused, not knowing

what they must hope.

Charlotte Lovell laid down her knitting. “You know as well as I do, Delia, that every young man who is inclined to fall in love with Tina will find as good reasons for not marrying her.”

“Then you think Lanning’s excuses are a pretext?”

“Naturally. The first of many that will be found by his successors — for of course he will have successors. Tina — attracts.”

“Ah,” Delia murmured.

Here they were at last face to face with

[116]

THE OLD MAID

the problem which, through all the years of silence and evasiveness, had lain as close to the surface as a corpse too hastily buried ! Delia drew another deep breath, which again was almost one of relief. She had always known that it would be dif¬ ficult, almost impossible, to find a husband for Tina; and much as she desired Tina’s happiness, some inmost selfishness whis¬ pered how much less lonely and purpose¬ less the close of her own life would be should the girl be forced to share it. But how say this to Tina’s mother?

“I hope you exaggerate, Charlotte. There may be disinterested characters. . . But, in any case, surely Tina need not be unhappy here, with us who love her so dearly.”

“Tina an old maid? Never!” Charlotte Lovell rose abruptly, her closed hand crashing down on the slender work-table.

[117]

THE OLD MAID

“My child shall have her life . . . her own life . . . whatever it costs me ...”

Delia’s ready sympathy welled up. “I understand your feeling. I should want also . . . hard as it will be to let her go. But surely there is no hurry — no reason for looking so far ahead. The child is not twenty. Wait.”

Charlotte stood before her, motionless, perpendicular. At such moments she made Delia think of lava struggling through granite: there seemed no issue fot the fires within.

“Wait? But if she doesn’t wait?”

“But if he has withdrawn — what do you mean?”

“He has given up marrying her — but not seeing her.”

Delia sprang up in her turn, flushed and trembling.

[118]

THE OLD MAID

“Charlotte! Do you know what you’re insinuating?”

“Yes: I know.”

“But it’s too outrageous. No decent girl-”

The words died on Delia’s lips. Char¬ lotte Lovell held her eyes inexorably. “Girls are not always what you call de¬ cent,” she declared.

Mrs. Ralston turned slowly back to her seat. Her tambour frame had fallen to the floor; she stooped heavily to pick it up. Charlotte’s gaunt figure hung over her, relentless as doom.

“I can’t imagine, Charlotte, what is gained by saying such things — even by hinting them. Surely you trust your own child.”

Charlotte laughed. “My mother trusted me,” she said.

“How dare you — how dare you?” Delia

[119]

THE OLD MAID

began; but her eyes fell, and she felt a tremor of weakness in her throat.

“Oh, I dare anything for Tina, even to judging her as she is,” Tina’s mother mur¬ mured.

“As she is? She’s perfect!”

“Let us say then that she must pay for my imperfections. All I want is that she shouldn’t pay too heavily.”

Mrs. Ralston sat silent. It seemed to her that Charlotte spoke with the voice of all the dark destinies coiled under the safe surface of life; and that to such a voice there was no answer but an awed acquies¬ cence.

“Poor Tina!” she breathed.

“Oh, I don’t intend that she shall suf¬ fer! It’s not for that that I’ve waited . . . waited. Only I’ve made mistakes: mistakes that I understand now, and must [ 120]

THE OLD MAID

remedy. You’ve been too good to us — and we must go.”

“Go?” Delia gasped.

“Yes. Don’t think me ungrateful. You saved my child once — do you suppose I can forget? But now it’s my turn — it’s I who must save her. And it’s only by tak¬ ing her away from everything here — from everything she’s known till now — that I can do it. She’s lived too long among un¬ realities: and she’s like me. They won’t content her.”

“Unrealities?” Delia echoed vaguely.

“Unrealities for her. Young men who make love to her and can’t marry her. Happy households where she’s welcomed till she’s suspected of designs on a brother or a husband — or else exposed to their in¬ sults. How could we ever have imagined, either of us, that the child could escape disaster? I thought only of her present

[121]

THE OLD MAID

happiness — of all the advantages, for both of us, of being with you. But this affair with young Halsey has opened my eyes. I must take Tina away. We must go and live somewhere where we’re not known, where we shall be among plain people, leading plain lives. Somewhere where she can find a husband, and make herself a home.”

Charlotte paused. She had spoken in a rapid monotonous tone, as if by rote; but now her voice broke and she repeated painfully: “I’m not ungrateful.”

“Oh, don’t let’s speak of gratitude! What place has it between you and me?”

Delia had risen and begun to move un¬ easily about the room. She longed to plead with Charlotte, to implore her not to be in haste, to picture to her the cruelty of severing Tina from all her habits and as¬ sociations, of carrying her inexplicably [122]

THE OLD MAID

away to lead “a plain life among plain people.” What chance was there, indeed, that a creature so radiant would tamely submit to such a fate, or find an acceptable husband in such conditions? The change might only precipitate a tragedy. Delia’s experience was too limited for her to pic¬ ture exactly what might happen to a girl like Tina, suddenly cut off from all that sweetened life for her; but vague visions of revolt and flight — of a “fall” deeper and more irretrievable than Charlotte’s — flashed through her agonized imagination.

“It’s too cruel — it’s too cruel,” she cried, speaking to herself rather than to Char¬ lotte.

Charlotte, instead of answering, glanced abruptly at the clock.

“Do you know what time it is? Past midnight. I mustn’t keep you sitting up for my foolish girl.”

[123]

THE OLD MAID

Delia’s heart contracted. She saw that Charlotte wished to cut the conversation short, and to do so by reminding her that only Tina’s mother had a right to decide what Tina’s future should be. At that moment, though Delia had just protested that there could be no question of grati¬ tude between them, Charlotte Lovell seemed to her a monster of ingratitude, and it was on the tip of her tongue to cry out: “Have all the years then given me no share in Tina?” But at the same in¬ stant she had put herself once more in Charlotte’s place, and was feeling the mother’s fierce terrors for her child. It was natural enough that Charlotte should resent the faintest attempt to usurp in private the authority she could never as¬ sert in public. With a pang of compassion Delia realized that she herself was liter¬ ally the one being on earth before whom [124]

THE OLD MAID

Charlotte could act the mother. “Poor thing — ah, let her!” she murmured in¬ wardly.

“But why should you sit up for Tina? She has the key, and Delia is to bring her home.”

Charlotte Lovell did not immediately answer. She rolled up her knitting, looked severely at one of the candelabra on the mantelpiece, and crossed over to straighten it. Then she picked up her work-bag.

“Yes, as you say — why should any one sit up for her?” She moved about the room, putting out the lamps, covering the fire, assuring herself that the windows were bolted, while Delia passively watched her. Then the two cousins lit their bed¬ room candles and walked upstairs through the darkened house. Charlotte seemed de¬ termined to make no further allusion to

[125]

THE OLD MAID

the subject of their talk. On the landing she paused, bending her head toward Delia’s nightly kiss.

“I hope they’ve kept up your fire,” she said, with her capable housekeeping air; and on Delia’s hasty reassurance the two murmured a simultaneous “Goodnight,” and Charlotte turned down the passage to her room.

IX

nvELIA S fire had been kept up, and her dressing-gown was warming on an arm-chair near the hearth. But she neither undressed nor yet seated herself. Her conversation with Charlotte had filled her with a deep unrest.

For a few moments she stood in the middle of the floor, looking slowly about her. Nothing had ever been changed in the room which, even as a bride, she had planned to modernize. All her dreams of renovation had faded long ago. Some deep central indifference had gradually made her regard herself as a third person, living the fife meant for another woman, a woman totally unrelated to the vivid

[ 127 ]

THE OLD MAID

Delia Lovell who had entered that house so full of plans and visions. The fault, she knew, was not her husband’s. With a little managing and a little wheedling she would have gained every point as easily as she had gained the capital one of taking the foundling baby under her wing. The difficulty was that, after that victory, noth¬ ing else seemed worth trying for. The first sight of little Tina had somehow de¬ centralized Delia Ralston’s whole life, making her indifferent to everything else, except indeed the welfare of her own hus¬ band and children. Ahead of her she saw only a future full of duties, and these she had gaily and faithfully accomplished. But her own life was over: she felt as de¬ tached as a cloistered nun.

The change in her was too deep not to be visible. The Ralstons openly gloried in dear Delia’s conformity. Each acquies- [128]

THE OLD MAID

cence passed for a concession, and the fam¬ ily doctrine was fortified by such fresh proofs of its durability. Now, as Delia glanced about her at the Leopold Robert lithographs, the family daguerreotypes, the rosewood and mahogany, she under¬ stood that she was looking at the walls of her own grave.

The change had come on the day when Charlotte Lovell, cowering on that very lounge, had made her terrible avowal. Then for the first time Delia, with a kind of fearful exaltation, had heard the blind forces of life groping and crying under¬ foot. But on that day also she had known herself excluded from them, doomed to dwell among shadows. Life had passed her by, and left her with the Ralstons.

Very well, then! She would make the best of herself, and of the Ralstons. The vow was immediate and unflinching; and

[129]

THE OLD MAID

for nearly twenty years she had gone on observing it. Once only had she been not a Ralston but herself; once only had it seemed worth while. And now perhaps the same challenge had sounded again; again, for a moment, it might be worth while to live. Not for the sake of Clement Spender — poor Clement, married years ago to a plain determined cousin, who had hunted him down in Rome, and enclosing him in an unrelenting domesticity, had obliged all New York on the grand tour to buy his pictures with a resigned grimace. No, not for Clement Spender, hardly for Charlotte or even for Tina; but for her own sake, hers, Delia Ralston’s, for the sake of her one missed vision, her for¬ feited reality, she would once more break down the Ralston barriers and reach out into the world.

A faint sound through the silent house [130]

THE OLD MAID

disturbed her meditation. Listening, she heard Charlotte Lovell’s door open and her stiff petticoats rustle toward the land¬ ing. A light glanced under the door and vanished; Charlotte had passed Delia’s threshold on her way downstairs.

Without moving, Delia continued to listen. Perhaps the careful Charlotte had gone down to make sure that the front door was not bolted, or that she had really covered up the fire. If that were her ob¬ ject, her step would presently be heard re¬ turning. But no step sounded ; and it be¬ came gradually evident that Charlotte had gone down to wait for her daughter. Why?

Delia’s bedroom was at the front of the house. She stole across the heavy carpet, drew aside the curtains and cautiously folded back the inner shutters. Below her lay the empty square, white with moon- night, its tree-trunks patterned on a fresh

[131]

THE OLD MAID

sprinkling of snow. The houses opposite slept in darkness; not a footfall broke the white surface, not a wheel-track marred the brilliant street. Overhead a heaven full of stars swam in the moonlight.

Of the households around Gramercy Park Delia knew that only two others had gone to the ball: the Petrus Vandergraves and their cousins the young Parmly Ral¬ stons. The Lucius Lannings had just en¬ tered on their three years of mourning for Mrs. Lucius’s mother ( it was hard on their daughter Kate, just eighteen, who would be unable to “come out” till she was twenty-one) ; young Mrs. Marcv Mingott was “expecting her third,” and conse¬ quently secluded from the public eye for nearly a year; and the other denizens of the square belonged to the undifferen¬ tiated and uninvited.

Delia pressed her forehead against the [132]

THE OLD MAID

pane. Before long carriages would turn the corner, the sleeping square ring with hoof -beats, fresh laughter and young fare¬ wells mount from the door-steps. But why was Charlotte waiting for her daugh¬ ter downstairs in the darkness?

The Parisian clock struck one. Delia came back into the room, raked the fire, picked up a shawl, and, wrapped in it, re¬ turned to her vigil. Ah, how old she must have grown, that she should feel the cold at such a moment! It reminded her of what the future held for her: neuralgia, rheumatism, stiffness, accumulating in¬ firmities. And never had she kept a moon¬ light watch with a lover’s arms to warm her . . .

The square still lay silent. Yet the ball must surely be ending: the gayest dances did not last long after one in the morning, and the drive from University

[ 133 ]

THE OLD MAID

Place to Gramercy Park was a short one* Delia leaned in the embrasure and lis¬ tened.

Hoof-beats, muffled by the snow, sounded in Irving Place, and the Petrus Vandergraves’ family coach drew up be¬ fore the opposite house. The Vander- grave girls and their brother sprang out and mounted the steps; then the coach stopped again a few doors farther on, and the Parmly Ralstons, brought home by their cousins, descended at their own door. The next carriage that rounded the corner must therefore be the John Juniuses’, bringing Tina.

The gilt clock struck half-past one. Delia wondered, knowing that young Delia, out of regard for John Junius’s business hours, never stayed late at eve¬ ning parties. Doubtless Tina had delayed her; Mrs. Ralston felt a little annoyed [134]

THE OLD MAID

with Tina’s thoughtlessness in keeping her cousin up. But the feeling was swept away by an immediate wave of sympathy. “We must go away somewhere, and lead plain lives among plain people.” If Charlotte carried out her threat — and Delia knew she would hardly have spoken unless her resolve had been taken — it might be that at that very moment poor Tina was dancing her last valse.

Another quarter of an hour passed; then, just as the cold was finding a way through Delia’s shawl, she saw two people turn into the deserted square from Irving Place. One was a young man in opera hat and ample cloak. To his arm clung a figure so closely wrapped and muffled that, until the corner light fell on it, Delia hesitated. After that, she wondered that she had not at once recognized Tina’s dancing step, and her manner of tilting

[ 135]

THE OLD MAID

her head a little sideways to look up at the person she was talking to.

Tina — Tina and Lanning Halsey, walking home alone in the small hours from the Vandergrave ball! Delia’s first thought was of an accident: the carriage might have broken down, or else her daughter been taken ill and obliged to return home. But no; in the latter case she would have sent the carriage on with Tina. And if there had been an accident of any sort the young people would have been hastening to apprise Mrs. Ralston; instead of which, through the bitter bril¬ liant night, they sauntered like lovers in a midsummer glade, and Tina’s thin slip¬ pers might have been falling on daisies instead of snow.

Delia began to tremble like a girl. In a flash she had the answer to a question which had long been the subject of her [ 136]

THE OLD MAID

secret conjectures. How did lovers like Charlotte and Clement Spender contrive to meet? What Latmian solitude hid their clandestine joys? In the exposed com¬ pact little society to which they all be¬ longed, how was it possible — literally — for such encounters to take place? Delia would never have dared to put the ques¬ tion to Charlotte; there were moments when she almost preferred not to know, not even to hazard a guess. But now, at a glance, she understood. How often Charlotte Lovell, staying alone in town with her infirm grandmother, must have walked home from evening parties with Clement Spender, how often have let her¬ self and him into the darkened house in Mercer Street, where there was no one to spy upon their coming but a deaf old lady and her aged servants, all securely sleep¬ ing overhead! Delia, at the thought, saw

[ 137 ]

THE OLD MAID

the grim drawing-room which had been their moonlit forest, the drawing-room into which old Mrs. Lovell no longer de¬ scended, with its swathed chandelier and hard Empire sofas, and the eyeless marble caryatids of the mantel; she pictured the shaft of moonlight falling across the swans and garlands of the faded carpet, and in that icy light two young figures in each other’s arms.

Y es : it must have been some such mem¬ ory that had roused Charlotte’s suspicions, excited her fears, sent her down in the darkness to confront the culprits. Delia shivered at the irony of the confrontation. If Tina had but known! But to Tina, of course, Charlotte was still what she had long since resolved to be: the image of prudish spinsterhood. And Delia could imagine how quietly and decently the scene below stairs would presently be [138]

THE OLD MAID

enacted: no astonishment, no reproaches, no insinuations, but a smiling and resolute ignoring of excuses.

“What, Tina? You walked home with Lanning? You imprudent child — in this wet snow! Ah, I see: Delia was worried about the baby, and ran off early, prom¬ ising to send back the carriage — and it never came? Well, my dear, I congratu¬ late you on finding Lanning to see you home. . . Yes — I sat up because I couldn’t for the life of me remember whether you’d taken the latch-key— was there ever such a flighty old aunt? But don’t tell your Mamma, dear, or she’d scold me for being so forgetful, and for staying downstairs in the cold. . . You’re quite sure you have the key? Ah, Lanning has it? Thank you, Lanning; so kind! Goodnight — or one really ought to say, good morning.”

As Delia reached this point in her mute

[ 139]

THE OLD MAID

representation of Charlotte’s monologue the front door slammed below, and young Lanning Halsey walked slowly away across the square. Delia saw him pause on the opposite pavement, look up at the house-front, and then turn lingeringly away. His dismissal had taken exactly as long as Delia had calculated it would. A moment later she saw a passing light under her door, heard the starched rustle of Charlotte’s petticoats, and knew that mother and daughter had reached their rooms.

Slowly, with stiff motions, she began to undress, blew out her candles, and knelt by her bedside, her face hidden.

X

T YING awake till morning, Delia * lived over every detail of the fateful day when she had assumed the charge of Charlotte’s child. At the time she had been hardly more than a child herself, and there had been no one for her to turn to, no one to fortify her resolution, or to advise her how to put it into effect. Since then, the accumulated experiences of twenty years ought to have prepared her for emergencies, and taught her to advise others instead of seeking their guidance. But these years of experience weighed on her like chains binding her down to her narrow plot of life; independent action struck her as more dangerous, less con-

[141]

THE OLD MAID

ceivable, than when she had first ventured on it. There seemed to be so many more people to “consider” now (“consider” was the Ralston word) : her children, their children, the families into which they had married. What would the Halseys say, and what the Ralstons? Had she then become a Ralston through and through?

A few hours later she sat in old Dr. Lanskell’s library, her eyes on his sooty Smyrna rug. For some years now Dr. Lanskell had no longer practised : at most, he continued to go to a few old patients, and to give consultations in “difficult” cases. But he remained a power in his former kingdom, a sort of lay Pope or medical Elder to whom the patients he had once healed of physical ills often re¬ turned for moral medicine. People were agreed that Dr. Lanskell’s judgment was [142]

THE OLD MAID

sound; but what secretly drew them to him was the fact that, in the most totem- ridden of communities, he was known not to be afraid of anything.

Now, as Delia sat and watched his mas¬ sive silver-headed figure moving ponder¬ ously about the room, between rows of medical books in calf bindings and the Dying Gladiators and Young Augustuses of grateful patients, she already felt the reassurance given by his mere bodily presence.

“You see, when I first took Tina I didn’t perhaps consider sufficiently — ’’

The Doctor halted behind his desk and brought his fist down on it with a genial thump. “Thank goodness you didn’t! There are considerers enough in this town without you, Delia Lovell.”

She looked up quickly. “Why do you call me Delia Lovell?”

[ 143 ]

THE OLD MAID

“Well, because today I rather suspect you are," he rejoined astutely; and she met this with a wistful laugh.

“Perhaps, if I hadn’t been, once before — I mean, if I’d always been a prudent deliberate Ralston it would have been kinder to Tina in the end.”

Dr. Lanskell sank his gouty bulk into the armchair behind his desk, and beamed at her through ironic spectacles. “I hate in-the-end kindnesses: they’re about as nourishing as the third day of cold mut¬ ton.”

She pondered. “Of course I realize that if I adopt Tina — ”

“Yes?”

“Well, people will say. . . ” A deep

blush rose to her throat, covered her cheeks and brow, and ran like fire under her decently-parted hair.

He nodded: “Yes.”

[ 144 ]

THE OLD MAID

“Or else — ” the blush darkened — “that she’s Jim’s — ”

Again Dr. Lanskell nodded. “That’s what they’re more likely to think; and what’s the harm if they do? I know Jim: he asked you no questions when you took the child — but he knew whose she was.”

She raised astonished eyes. “He knew—?”

“Yes: he came to me. And — well — in the baby’s interest I violated profes¬ sional secrecy. That’s how Tina got a home. You’re not going to denounce me, are you?”

“Oh, Dr. Lanskell — ” Her eyes filled with painful tears. “Jim knew? And didn’t tell me?”

“No. People didn’t tell each other things much in those days, did they? But he admired you enormously for what you did. And if you assume — as I suppose

[ 145 ]

THE OLD MAID

you do — that he’s now in a world of com¬ pleter enlightenment, why not take it for granted that he’ll admire you still more for what you’re going to do? Presum¬ ably,” the Doctor concluded sardonically, “people realize in heaven that it’s a devil¬ ish sight harder, on earth, to do a brave thing at forty-five than at twenty-five.”

“Ah, that’s what I was thinking this morning,” she confessed.

“Well, you’re going to prove the con¬ trary this afternoon.” He looked at his watch, stood up and laid a fatherly hand on her shoulder. “Let people think what they choose; and send young Delia to me if she gives you any trouble. Your boy won’t, you know, nor John Junius either; it must have been a woman who invented that third-and-fourth generation idea . .

An elderly maid-servant looked in, and Delia rose ; but on the threshold she halted. [ 146 ]

THE OLD MAID

“I have an idea it’s Charlotte I may have to send to you.”

“Charlotte?”

“She'll hate what I’m going to do, you know.”

Dr. Lanskell lifted his silver eye¬ brows. “Yes: poor Charlotte! I sup¬ pose she’s jealous? That’s where the truth of the third-and-fourth generation business comes in, after all. Somebody always has to foot the bill.”

“All — if only Tina doesn’t!”

“Well — that’s just what Charlotte will come to recognize in time. So your course is clear.”

He guided her out through the dining¬ room, where some poor people and one or two old patients were already waiting.

Delia’s course, in truth, seemed clear enough till, that afternoon, she summoned

[ 1*7]

THE OLD MAID

Charlotte alone to her bedroom. Tina was lying down with a headache: it was in those days the accepted state of young ladies in sentimental dilemmas, and greatly simplified the communion of their elders.

Delia and Charlotte had exchanged only conventional phrases over their mid¬ day meal; but Delia still had the sense that her cousin’s decision was final. The events of the previous evening had no doubt confirmed Charlotte’s view that the time had come for such a decision.

Miss Lovell, closing the bedroom door with her dry deliberateness, advanced to¬ ward the chintz lounge between the win¬ dows.

“You wanted to see me, Delia?”

“Yes. — Oh, don’t sit there,” Mrs. Ral¬ ston exclaimed uncontrollably.

Charlotte stared : was it possible that she [ 148]

THE OLD MAID

did pot remember the sobs of anguish she had once smothered in those very cush¬ ions?

“Not—?”

“No; come nearer to me. Sometimes I think I’m a little deaf,” Delia nervously explained, pushing a chair up to her own.

“Ah.” Charlotte seated herself. “I hadn’t remarked it. But if you are, it may have saved you from hearing at what hour of the morning Tina came back from the Vandergraves’ last night. She would never forgive herself — inconsiderate as she is — if she thought she’d waked you.”

“She didn’t wake me,” Delia answered. Inwardly she thought: “Charlotte’s mind is made up ; I shan’t be able to move her.”

“I suppose Tina enjoyed herself very much at the ball?” she continued.

“Well, she’s paying for it with a head-

[ 149 ]

THE OLD MAID

ache. Such excitements are not meant for her, I’ve already told you — ”

“Yes,” Mrs. Ralston interrupted. “It’s to continue our talk of last night that I’ve asked you to come up.”

“To continue it?” The brick-red circles appeared on Charlotte’s dried cheeks. “Is it worth while? I think I ought to tell you at once that my mind’s made up. I suppose you’ll admit that I know what’s best for Tina.”

“Yes ; of course. But won’t you at least allow me a share in your decision?”

“A share?”

Delia leaned forward, laying a warm hand on her cousin’s interlocked fingers. “Charlotte, once in this room, years ago, you asked me to help you — you believed I could. Won’t you believe it again?”

Charlotte’s lips grew rigid. “I believe the time has come for me to help myself.” [150]

THE OLD MAID

“At the cost of Tina’s happiness?”

“No; but to spare her greater unhappi¬ ness.”

“But, Charlotte, Tina’s happiness is all I want.”

“Oh, I know. You’ve done all you could do for my child.”

“No; not all.” Delia rose, and stood before her cousin with a kind of solemnity. “But now I’m going to.” It was as if she had pronounced a vow.

Charlotte Lovell looked up at her with a glitter of apprehension in her hunted eyes.

“If you mean that you’re going to use your influence with the Halseys — I’m very grateful to you; I shall always be grate¬ ful. But I don’t want a compulsory mar¬ riage for my child.”

Delia flushed at the other’s incompre¬ hension. It seemed to her that her tre-

[ 151 ]

THE OLD MAID

mendous purpose must be written on her face. “I’m going to adopt Tina — give her my name,” she announced.

Charlotte Lovell stared at her stonily. “Adopt her — adopt her?”

“Don’t you see, dear, the difference it will make ? There’s my mother’s money — the Lovell money; it’s not much, to be sure ; but J im always wanted it to go back to the Lovells. And my Delia and her brother are so handsomely provided for. There’s no reason why my little fortune shouldn’t go to Tina. And why she shouldn’t be known as Tina Ralston.” Delia paused. “I believe — I think I know — that Jim would have approved of that too.”

“Approved?”

“Yes. Can’t you see that when he let me take the child he must have foreseen [ 152]

THE OLD MAID

and accepted whatever — whatever might eventually come of it?”

Charlotte stood up also. “Thank you, Delia. But nothing more must come of it, except our leaving you ; our leaving you now. I’m sure that’s what Jim would have approved.”

Mrs. Ralston drew hack a step or two. Charlotte’s cold resolution benumbed her courage, and she could find no immediate reply.

“Ah, then it’s easier for you to sacrifice Tina’s happiness than your pride?” she exclaimed.

“My pride? I’ve no right to any pride, except in my child. And that I’ll never sacrifice.”

“No one asks you to. You’re not rea¬ sonable. You’re cruel. All I want is to be allowed to help Tina, and you speak as if I were interfering with your rights.”

[153]

THE OLD MAID

“My rights?” Charlotte echoed the words with a desolate laugh. “What are they? I have no rights, either before the law or in the heart of my own child.”

“How can you say such things? You know how Tina loves you.”

“Yes; compassionately — as I used to love my old-maid aunts. There were two of them — you remember? Like withered babies! We children used to be warned never to say anything that might shock Aunt Josie or Aunt Nonie; exactly as I heard you telling Tina the other night — ”

“Oh — ” Delia murmured.

Charlotte Lovell continued to stand before her, haggard, rigid, unrelenting. “No, it’s gone on long enough. I mean to tell her everything; and to take her away.”

“To tell her about her birth?”

[ 154 ]

THE OLD MAID

“I was never ashamed of it,” Charlotte panted.

“You do sacrifice her, then — sacrifice her to your desire for mastery?”

The two women faced each other, both with weapons spent. Delia, through the tremor of her own indignation, saw her antagonist slowly waver, step backward, sink down with a broken murmur on the lounge. Charlotte hid her face in the cushions, clenching them with violent hands. The same fierce maternal passion that had once flung her down upon those same cushions was now bowing her still lower, in the throes of a bitterer renuncia¬ tion. Delia seemed to hear the old cry: “But how can I give up my baby?” Her own momentary resentment melted, and she bent over the mother’s labouring shoulders.

“Chatty — it won’t be like giving her up

[ 1««]

THE OLD MAID

this time. Can’t we just go on loving her together?”

Charlotte did not answer. For a long time she lay silent, immovable, her face hidden: she seemed to fear to turn it to the face bent down to her. But presently Delia was aware of a gradual relaxing of the stretched muscles, and saw that one of her cousin’s arms was faintly stirring and groping. She lowered her hand to the seeking fingers, and it was caught and pressed to Charlotte’s lips.

XI

f I MNA LOVELL — now Miss Clemen- tina Ralston — was to be married in July to Lanning Halsey. The engage¬ ment had been announced only in the previous April; and the female elders of the tribe had begun by crying out against the indelicacy of so brief a betrothal. It was unanimously agreed in the New York of those times that “young people should be given the chance to get to know each other”; though the greater number of the couples constituting New York so¬ ciety had played together as children, and been born of parents as long and as fa¬ miliarly acquainted, yet some mysterious law of decorum required that the newly

[ 157 ]

THE OLD MAID

affianced should always be regarded as being also newly known to each other. In the southern states things were differ¬ ently conducted: headlong engagements, even runaway marriages, were not un¬ common in their annals ; but such rashness was less consonant with the sluggish blood of New York, where the pace of life was still set with a Dutch deliberateness.

In a case as unusual as Tina Ralston’s, however, it was no great surprise to any one that tradition should have been disre¬ garded. In the first place, everybody knew that she was no more Tina Ralston than you or I ; unless, indeed, one were to credit the rumours about poor Jim’s unsuspected “past,” and his widow’s mag¬ nanimity. But the opinion of the major¬ ity was against this. People were reluc¬ tant to charge a dead man with an offense from which he could not clear himself; [158]

THE OLD MAID

and the Ralstons unanimously declared that, thoroughly as they disapproved of Mrs. James Ralston’s action, they were convinced that she would not have adopted Tina if her doing so could have been construed as “casting a slur” on her late husband.

No: the girl was perhaps a Lovell — though even that idea was not generally held — but she was certainly not a Ralston. Her brown eyes and flighty ways too ob¬ viously excluded her from the clan for any formal excommunication to be needful. In fact, most people believed that — as Dr. Lanskell had always affirmed— her origin was really undiscoverable, that she repre¬ sented one of the unsolved mysteries which occasionally perplex and irritate well- regulated societies, and that her adoption by Delia Ralston was simply one more proof of the Lovell clannishness, since the

[ 159]

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child had been taken in by Mrs. Ralston only because her cousin Charlotte was so attached to it. To say that Mrs. Ralston’s son and daughter were pleased with the idea of Tina’s adoption would be an exag¬ geration; but they abstained from com¬ ment, minimizing the effect of their mother’s whim by a dignified silence. It was the old New York way for families thus to screen the eccentricities of an in¬ dividual member, and where there was “money enough to go round” the heirs would have been thought vulgarly grasp¬ ing to protest at the alienation of a small sum from the general inheritance.

Nevertheless, Delia Ralston, from the moment of Tina’s adoption, was perfectly aware of a different attitude on the part of both her children. They dealt with her patiently, almost parentally, as with a minor in whom one juvenile lapse has [ 160]

THE OLD MAID

been condoned, but who must be sub¬ jected, in consequence, to a stricter vig¬ ilance ; and society treated her in the same indulgent but guarded manner.

She had (it was Sillerton Jackson who first phrased it) an undoubted way of “carrying things off”; since that daunt¬ less woman, Mrs. Manson Mingott, had broken her husband’s will, nothing so like her attitude had been seen in New York. But Mrs. Ralston’s method was differ¬ ent, and less easy to analyze. What Mrs. Manson Mingott had accomplished by dint of epigram, invective, insistency and runnings to and fro, the other achieved without raising her voice or seeming to take a step from the beaten path. When she had persuaded Jim Ralston to take in the foundling baby, it had been done in the turn of a hand, one didn’t know when or how; and the next day he and

[161]

THE OLD MAID

she were as untroubled and beaming as usual. And now, this adoption — ! Well, she had pursued the same method; as Sil- lerton Jackson said, she behaved as if her adopting Tina had always been an under¬ stood thing, as if she wondered that people should wonder. And in face of her won¬ der theirs seemed foolish, and they grad¬ ually desisted.

In reality, behind Delia’s assurance there was a tumult of doubts and uncer¬ tainties. But she had once learned that one can do almost anything (perhaps even murder) if one does not attempt to ex¬ plain it; and the lesson had never been forgotten. She had never explained the taking over of the foundling baby; nor was she now going to explain its adoption. She was just going about her business as if nothing had happened that needed to be accounted for; and a long inheri- [162]

THE OLD MAID

tance of moral modesty helped her to keep her questionings to herself.

These questionings were in fact less concerned with public opinion than with Charlotte Lovell’s private thoughts. Charlotte, after her first moment of tragic resistance, had shown herself pathetically, almost painfully, grateful. That she had reason to be, Tina’s attitude abundantly revealed. Tina, during the first days af¬ ter her return from the Vandergrave ball, had shown a closed and darkened face that terribly reminded Delia of the ghast¬ liness of Charlotte Lovell’s sudden reflec¬ tion, years before, in Delia’s own bedroom mirror. The first chapter of the mother’s history was already written in the daugh¬ ter’s eyes; and the Spender blood in Tina might well precipitate the sequence. Dur¬ ing those few days of silent observation Delia discovered, with terror and com-

[163]

THE OLD MAID

passion, the justification of Charlotte’s fears. The girl had nearly been lost to them both: at all costs such a risk must not be renewed.

The Halseys, on the whole, had behaved admirably. Lanning wished to marry dear Delia Ralston’s protegee — who was shortly, it was understood, to take her adopted mother’s name, and inherit her fortune. To what better could a Halsey aspire than one more alliance with a Ral¬ ston? The families had always inter¬ married. The Halsey parents gave their blessing with a precipitation which showed that they too had their anxieties, and that the relief of seeing Lanning “settled” would more than compensate for the con¬ ceivable drawbacks of the marriage; though, once it was decided on, they would not admit even to themselves that such drawbacks existed. Old New York al- [ 164 ]

THE OLD MAID

ways thought away whatever interfered with the perfect propriety of its arrange¬ ments.

Charlotte Lovell of course perceived and recognized all this. She accepted the situation — in her private hours with Delia — as one more in the long list of mercies bestowed on an undeserving sinner. And one phrase of hers perhaps gave the clue to her acceptance: “Now at least she’ll never suspect the truth.” It had come to be the poor creature’s ruling purpose that her child should never guess the tie be¬ tween them . . .

But Delia’s chief support was the sight of Tina. The older woman, whose whole life had been shaped and coloured by the faint reflection of a rejected happiness, hung dazzled in the light of bliss accepted. Sometimes, as she watched Tina’s chang¬ ing face, she felt as though her own blood

[ 165 ]

THE OLD MAID

were beating in it, as though she could read every thought and emotion feeding those tumultuous currents. Tina’s love was a stormy affair, with continual ups and downs of rapture and depression, ar¬ rogance and self-abasement; Delia saw displayed before her, with an artless frankness, all the visions, cravings and imaginings of her own stifled youth.

What the girl really thought of her adoption it was not easy to discover. She had been given, at fourteen, the current version of her origin, and had accepted it as carelessly as a happy child accepts some remote and inconceivable fact which does not alter the familiar order of things. And she accepted her adoption in the same spirit. She knew that the name of Ral¬ ston had been given to her to facilitate her marriage with Lanning Halsey; and Delia had the impression that all irrele- [ 166]

THE OLD MAID

vant questionings were submerged in an overwhelming gratitude. “I’ve always thought of you as my Mamma; and now, you dearest, you really are,” Tina had whispered, her cheek against Delia’s; and Delia had laughed back: “Well, if the lawyers can make me so!” But there the matter dropped, swept away on the cur¬ rent of Tina’s bliss. They were all, in those days, Delia, Charlotte, even the gal¬ lant Lanning, rather like straws whirling about on a sunlit torrent.

The golden flood bore them onward, nearer and nearer to the enchanted date; and Delia, deep in bridal preparations, wondered at the comparative indifference with which she had ordered and inspected her own daughter’s twelve-dozen-of- everything. There had been nothing to quicken the pulse in young Delia’s placid bridal; but as Tina’s wedding day ap-

[ 167 ]

THE OLD MAID

proached imagination burgeoned like the year. The wedding was to be celebrated at Lovell Place, the old house on the Sound where Delia Lovell had herself been married, and where, since her moth¬ er’s death, she spent her summers. Al¬ though' the neighbourhood was already overspread with a net-work of mean streets, the old house, with its thin colon¬ naded verandah, still looked across an un¬ curtailed lawn and leafy shrubberies to the narrows of Hell Gate; and the draw¬ ing-rooms kept their frail slender settees, their Sheraton consoles and cabinets. It had been thought useless to discard them for more fashionable furniture, since the growth of the city made it certain that the place must eventually be sold.

Tina, like Mrs. Ralston, was to have a “house-wedding,” though Episcopalian society was beginning to disapprove of [168]

THE OLD MAID

such ceremonies, which were regarded as the despised pis-aller of Baptists, Metho¬ dists, Unitarians and the other altarless sects. In Tina’s case, however, both Delia and Charlotte felt that the greater privacy of a marriage in the house made up for its more secular character; and the Hal¬ seys favoured their decision. The ladies accordingly settled themselves at Lovell Place before the end of June, and every morning young Lanning Halsey’s cat- boat was seen beating across the bay, and furling its sail at the anchorage below the lawn.

There had never been a fairer June in any one’s memory. The damask roses and mignonette below the verandah had never sent such a breath of summer through the tall French windows ; the gnarled orange- trees brought out from the old arcaded

[ 169]

THE OLD MAID

orange-house had never been so thickly blossomed; the very haycocks on the lawn gave out whiffs of Araby.

The evening before the wedding Delia Ralston sat on the verandah watching the moon rise across the Sound. She was tired with the multitude of last preparations, and sad at the thought of Tina’s going. On the following evening the house would be empty: till death came, she and Char¬ lotte would sit alone together beside the evening lamp. Such repinings were fool¬ ish — they were, she reminded herself, “not like her.” But too many memories stirred and murmured in her : her heart was haunted. As she closed the door on the silent drawing-room — already trans¬ formed into a chapel, with its lace-hung altar, the tall alabaster vases awaiting their white roses and June lilies, the strip of red carpet dividing the rows of chairs [ 170 ]

THE OLD MAID

from door to chancel — she felt that it had perhaps been a mistake to come back to Lovell Place for the wedding. She saw herself again, in her high-waisted “India mull” embroidered with daisies, her flat satin sandals, her Brussels veil — saw again her reflection in the sallow pier-glass as she had left that same room on Jim Ralston’s triumphant arm, and the one terrified glance she had exchanged with her own image before she took her stand under the bell of white roses in the hall, and smiled upon the congratulating company. Ah, what a different image the pier-glass would reflect tomorrow!

Charlotte Lovell’s brisk step sounded indoors, and she came out and joined Mrs. Ralston.

“I’ve been to the kitchen to tell Melissa Grimes that she’d better count on at least two hundred plates of ice-cream.”

[ 171 ]

THE OLD MAID

“Two hundred? Yes — I suppose she had, with all the Philadelphia connection coming.” Delia pondered. “How about the doylies?” she enquired.

“With your aunt Cecilia Vandergrave’s we shall manage beautifully.”

“Yes. — Thank you, Charlotte, for tak¬ ing all this trouble.”

“Oh — ” Charlotte protested, with her flitting sneer; and Delia perceived the irony of thanking a mother for occupying herself with the details of her own daugh¬ ter’s wedding.

“Do sit down, Chatty,” she murmured, feeling herself redden at her blunder.

Charlotte, with a sigh of fatigue, sat down on the nearest chair.

“We shall have a beautiful day tomor¬ row,” she said, pensively surveying the placid heaven.

“Yes. Where is Tina?”

[172]

THE OLD MAID

“She was very tired. I’ve sent her up¬ stairs to lie down.”

This seemed so eminently suitable that Delia made no immediate answer. After an interval she said: “We shall miss her.”

Charlotte’s reply was an inarticulate murmur.

The two cousins remained silent, Char¬ lotte as usual bolt upright, her thin hands clutched on the arms of her old-fashioned rush-bottomed seat, Delia somewhat heav¬ ily sunk into the depths of a high-backed armchair. The two had exchanged their last remarks on the preparations for the morrow; nothing more remained to be said as to the number of guests, the brewing of the punch, the arrangements for the robing of the clergy, and the disposal of the presents in the best spare-room.

Only one subject had not yet been touched upon, and Delia, as she watched

[ 173 ]

THE OLD MAID

her cousin’s profile grimly cut upon the melting twilight, waited for Charlotte to speak. But Charlotte remained silent.

“I have been thinking,” Delia at length began, a slight tremor in her voice, “that I ought presently — ”

She fancied she saw Charlotte’s hands tighten on the knobs of the chair -arms.

“You ought presently — ?”

“Well, before Tina goes to bed, perhaps go up for a few minutes — ”

Charlotte remained silent, visibly re¬ solved on making no effort to assist her.

“Tomorrow,” Delia continued, “we shall be in such a rush from the earliest moment that I don’t see how, in the midst of all the interruptions and excitement, I can possibly — ”

“Possibly?” Charlotte monotonously echoed.

Delia felt her blush deepening through [174]

THE OLD MAID

the dusk. “Well, I suppose you agree with me, don’t you, that a word ought to be said to the child as to the new duties and responsibilities that — well — what is usual, in fact, at such a time?” she falter- ingly ended.

“Yes, I have thought of that,” Charlotte answered. She said no more, but Delia divined in her tone the stirring of that obscure opposition which, at the crucial moments of Tina’s life, seemed automati¬ cally to declare itself. She could not un¬ derstand why Charlotte should, at such times, grow so enigmatic and inaccessible, and in the present case she saw no reason why this change of mood should interfere with what she deemed to be her own duty. Tina must long for her guiding hand into the new life as much as she herself yearned for the exchange of half-confidences which would be her real farewell to her adopted

[175]

THE OLD MAID

daughter. Her heart beating a little more quickly than usual, she rose and walked through the open window into the shad¬ owy drawing-room. The moon, between the columns of the verandah, sent a broad band of light across the rows of chairs, irradiated the lace-decked altar with its empty candlesticks and vases, and out¬ lined with silver Delia’s heavy reflection in the pier-glass.

She crossed the room toward the hall.

“Delia!” Charlotte’s voice sounded be¬ hind her. Delia turned, and the two women scrutinized each other in the re¬ vealing light. Charlotte’s face looked as it had looked on the dreadful day when Delia had suddenly seen it in the looking- glass above her shoulder.

“You were going up now to speak to Tina?” Charlotte asked.

“I — yes. It’s nearly nine. I thought . . .” [176]

THE OLD MAID

“Yes; I understand.” Miss Lovell made a visible effort at self-control. “Please understand me too, Delia, if I ask you — not to.”

Delia looked at her cousin with a vague sense of apprehension. What new mys¬ tery did this strange request conceal? But no — such a doubt as flitted across her mind was inadmissible. She was too sure of her Tina!

“I confess I don’t understand, Char¬ lotte. You surely feel that, on the night before her wedding, a girl ought to have a mother’s counsel, a mother’s ...”

“Yes; I feel that.” Charlotte Lovell took a hurried breath. “But the question is : which of us is her mother

Delia drew back involuntarily. “Which of us — ?” she stammered.

“Yes. Oh, don’t imagine it’s the first time I’ve asked myself the question!

[ 177 ]

THE OLD MAID

There — I mean to be calm ; quite calm. I don’t intend to go back to the past. I’ve accepted — accepted everything — grate¬ fully. Only tonight — just tonight . . .”

Delia felt the rush of pity which always prevailed over every other sensation in her rare interchanges of truth with Charlotte Lovell. Her throat filled with tears, and she remained silent.

“Just tonight,’’ Charlotte concluded, f'Fm her mother.”

“Charlotte! You’re not going to tell her so — not now?” broke involuntarily from Delia.

Charlotte gave a faint laugh. “If I did, should you hate it as much as all that?”

“Hate it? What a word, between us!”

“Between us? But it’s the word that’s been between us since the beginning — the very beginning! Since the day when you discovered that Clement Spender hadn’t [ 178 ]

THE OLD MAID

quite broken his heart because he wasn’t good enough for you; since you found your revenge and your triumph in keeping me at your mercy, and in taking his child from me!” Charlotte’s words flamed up as if from the depth of the infernal fires; then the blaze dropped, her head sank for¬ ward, and she stood before Delia dumb and stricken.

Delia’s first movement was one of an indignant recoil. Where she had felt only tenderness, compassion, the impulse to help and befriend, these darknesses had been smouldering in the other’s breast! It was as if a poisonous smoke had swept over some pure summer landscape. . .

Usually such feelings were quickly fol¬ lowed by a reaction of sympathy. But now she felt none. An utter weariness possessed her.

“Yes,” she said slowly, “I sometimes

[ 179 ]

THE OLD MAID

believe you really have hated me from the very first; hated me for everything I’ve tried to do for you.”

Charlotte raised her head sharply. “To do for me? But everything you’ve done has been done for Clement Spender!”

Delia stared at her with a kind of terror. “You are horrible, Charlotte. Upon my honour, I haven’t thought of Clement Spender for years.”

“Ah, but you have — you have! You’ve always thought of him in thinking of Tina — of him and nobody else! A woman never stops thinking of the man she loves. She thinks of him years afterward, in all sorts of unconscious ways, in thinking of all sorts of things — books, pictures, sun¬ sets, a flower or a ribbon — or a clock on the mantelpiece,” Charlotte broke off with her sneering laugh. “That was what 1 gambled on, you see — that’s why I came [ 180]

THE OLD MAID

to you that day. I knew I was giving Tina another mother.”

Again the poisonous smoke seemed to envelop Delia : that she and Charlotte, two spent old women, should be standing be¬ fore Tina’s bridal altar and talking to each other of hatred, seemed unimagi¬ nably hideous and degrading.

“You wicked woman — you are wicked!” she exclaimed.

Then the evil mist cleared away, and through it she saw the baffled pitiful figure of the mother who was not a mother, and who, for every benefit accepted, felt her¬ self robbed of a privilege. She moved nearer to Charlotte and laid a hand on her arm.

“Not here! Don’t let us talk like this here.”

The other drew away from her. “Wher¬ ever you please, then. I’m not particular !”

[181]

THE OLD MAID

“But tonight, Charlotte — the night be¬ fore Tina’s wedding? Isn’t every place in this house full of her? How could we go on saying cruel things to each other any¬ where?” Charlotte was silent, and Delia continued in a steadier voice: “Nothing you say can really hurt me — for long; and I don’t want to hurt you — I never did.”

“You tell me that — and you’ve left nothing undone to divide me from my daughter! Do you suppose it’s been easy, all these years, to hear her call you ‘mother’? Oh, I know, I know — -it was agreed that she must never guess . . . but if you hadn’t perpetually come between us she’d have had no one but me, she’d have felt about me as a child feels about its mother, she’d have had to love me better than any one else. With all your forbear¬ ances and your generosities you’ve ended [182]

THE OLD MAID

by robbing me of my child. And I’ve put up with it all for her sake — because I knew I had to. But tonight — tonight she be¬ longs to me. Tonight I can’t bear that she should call you ‘mother’.”

Delia Ralston made no immediate re¬ ply. It seemed to her that for the first time she had sounded the deepest depths of maternal passion, and she stood awed at the echoes it gave back.

“How you must love her — to say such things to me,” she murmured; then, with a final effort : “Yes, you’re right. I won’t go up to her. It’s you who must go.”

Charlotte started toward her impul¬ sively; but with a hand lifted as if in de¬ fense, Delia moved across the room and out again to the verandah. As she sank down in her chair she heard the drawing¬ room door open and close, and the sound of Charlotte’s feet on the stairs.

[183]

THE OLD MAID

Delia sat alone in the night. The last drop of her magnanimity had been spent, and she tried to avert her shuddering mind from Charlotte. What was happening at this moment upstairs? With what dark revelations were Tina’s bridal dreams to be defaced? Well, that was not matter for conjecture either. She, Delia Ralston, had played her part, done her utmost: there remained nothing now but to try to lift her spirit above the embittering sense of failure.

There was a strange element of truth in some of the things that Charlotte had said. With what divination her maternal passion had endowed her! Her jealousy seemed to have a million feelers. Yes; it was true that the sweetness and peace of Tina’s bridal eve had been filled, for Delia, with visions of her own unrealized past. Softly, imperceptibly, it had reconciled [ 184]

THE OLD MAID

her to the memory of what she had missed. All these last days she had been living the girl’s life, she had been Tina, and Tina had been her own girlish self, the far-off Delia Lovell. Now for the first time, without shame, without self-reproach, without a pang or a scruple, Delia could yield to that vision of requited love from which her imagination had always turned away. She had made her choice in youth, and she had accepted it in maturity; and here in this bridal joy, so mysteriously her own, was the compensation for all she had missed and yet never renounced.

Delia understood now that Charlotte had guessed all this, and that the knowl¬ edge had filled her with a fierce resent¬ ment. Charlotte had said long ago that Clement Spender had never really be¬ longed to her ; now she had perceived that it was the same with Clement Spender’s

[185]

THE OLD MAID

child. As the truth stole upon Delia her heart melted with the old compassion for Charlotte. She saw that it was a terrible, a sacrilegious thing to interfere with another’s destiny, to lay the tenderest touch upon any human being’s right to love and suffer after his own fashion. Delia had twice intervened in Charlotte Lovell’s life : it was natural that Charlotte should be her enemy. If only she did not revenge herself by wounding Tina!

The adopted mother’s thoughts reverted painfully to the little white room upstairs. She had meant her half-hour with Tina to leave the girl with thoughts as fragrant as the flowers she was to find beside her when she woke. And now — .

Delia started up from her musing. There was a step on the stair — Charlotte coming down through the silent house. Delia rose with a vague impulse of escape : [ 186]

THE OLD MAID

she felt that she could not face her cousin’s eyes. She turned the corner of the veran¬ dah, hoping to find the shutters of the dining-room unlatched, and to slip away unnoticed to her room; but in a moment Charlotte was beside her.

“Delia!”

“Ah, it’s you? I was going up to bed.” For the life of her Delia could not keep an edge of hardness from her voice.

“Yes: it’s late. You must be very tired.” Charlotte paused; her own voice was strained and painful.

“I am tired,” Delia acknowledged.

In the moonlit hush the other went up to her, laying a timid touch on her arm.

“Not till you’ve seen Tina.”

Delia stiffened. “Tina? But it’s late! Isn’t she sleeping? I thought you’d stay with her until — ”

“I don’t know if she’s sleeping.” Char-

[ 187 ]

THE OLD MAID

lotte paused. “I haven’t been in — but there’s a light under her door.”

“You haven’t been in?”

“No: I just stood in the passage, and tried — ”

“Tried—?”

“To think of something . . . something to say to her without . . . without her guessing. . . ” A sob stopped her, but she pressed on with a final effort. “It’s no use. You were right: there’s nothing I can say. You’re her real mother. Go to her. It’s not your fault — or mine.”

“Oh—” Delia cried.

Charlotte clung to her in inarticulate abasement. “You said I was wicked — I’m not wicked. After all, she was mine when she was little!”

Delia put an arm about her shoulder.

“Hush, dear! We’ll go to her to¬ gether.”

[188]

THE OLD MAID

The other yielded automatically to her touch, and side by side the two women mounted the stairs, Charlotte timing her impetuous step to Delia’s stiffened move¬ ments. They walked down the passage to Tina’s door; but there Charlotte Lovell paused and shook her head.

“No — you,” she whispered, and turned away.

Tina lay in bed, her arms folded under her head, her happy eyes reflecting the silver space of sky which filled the window. She smiled at Delia through her dream.

“I knew you’d come.”

Delia sat down beside her, and their clasped hands lay upon the coverlet. They did not say much, after all; or else their communion had no need of words. Delia Clever knew how long she sat by the child’s

[189]

THE OLD MAID

side: she abandoned herself to the spell of the moonlit hour.

But suddenly she thought of Charlotte, alone behind the shut door of her own room, watching, struggling, listening. Delia must not, for her own pleasure, pro¬ long that tragic vigil. She bent down to kiss Tina goodnight; then she paused on the threshold and turned back.

“Darling! Just one thing more.”

“Yes?” Tina murmured through her dream.

“I want you to promise me — ”

“Everything, everything, you darling mother!”

“Well, then, that when you go away to¬ morrow — at the very last moment, you understand — ”

“Yes?”

“After you’ve said goodbye to me, and [190]

THE OLD MAID

to everybody else — just as Lanning helps you into the carriage — ”

“Yes?”

“That you’ll give your last kiss to Aunt Charlotte. Don’t forget — the very last.”

(6)

THE END

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